(0) I’m off to attend a college ceremony my daughter’s featured in, so today’s Scroll is a little light. Add in the comments anything else I should have included!
(1) PHILIP PULLMAN ON RADIO 4. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Philip Pullman was on Tuesday’s BBC Radio 4’s World At One news programme talking about his final Dust book. No spoilers, but it is about imagination.
Plus, Sir Philip Pullman gives us his only interview about the final book of the His Dark Materials series.
The 45 minute programme is here but you need to go to 5 minutes before the end as it’s the last item.
(2) TUNNEL VISION. James Davis Nicoll invites fans to dig into “Five SFF Novels Featuring Tunnels” at Reactor. Here’s one of his recommendations.
Above by Leah Bobet (2011)
Deep beneath Toronto’s streets, mutants thrive. Or at least, survive. The so-called Beasts who live in Safe each have their own special gifts. Some control electricity; some can converse with ghosts; one can even become a bee when she wills it so. Few would be welcomed if they were foolish enough to leave Safe for the surface world. So history says, and Matthew the Teller would never doubt what he has been taught.
An exile’s return brings violence and calamity to once-safe Safe. As Shadows invade, Matthew is forced to flee. Trapped on the surface, Matthew learns that the truth is more complicated than he knew.
I don’t think that the name “Toronto” ever appears in the novel’s text, but the descriptions and the street names strongly suggest a Toronto setting. So does the cover, although I suppose that could be any Canadian city with a CN Tower4.
(3) AS CLEAR AS IS THE SUMMER SUN. Kayla Allen and Linda Deneroff say they have “concluded that Westercon simply doesn’t have enough interest anymore, and rather than just have it fizzle out completely, we should try to organize an orderly shutdown by repealing the Bylaws and handing the convention’s ‘charter’ back to LASFS.” They are submitting this motion to the Westercon Business Meeting being held at BayCon in Santa Clara this year.
Short Title: Retire Westercon
Moved, to repeal the Westercon Bylaws.
Provided, That any Westercon selected under the current Bylaws at the conclusion of the Westercon where this motion is ratified shall be held and such Westercons shall be bound by those portions of Article 1 applicable to the convention. Such Westercons shall not conduct a Business Meeting or a Site Selection.
Proposed by: Kayla Allen, Linda Deneroff
Discussion: If the consensus is that Westercon no longer has a purpose and should retire, the most orderly way to do so would be for the members of Westercon to vote to repeal its own bylaws. This would have the effect of “handing in the charter” to the owner of the Westercon service mark, LASFS. The LASFS could then decide what it wanted to do with Westercon, which could include abandoning the service mark so that anyone who wished to do so could hold their own convention under the name “Westercon.”
Amendments to the Bylaws take effect as of the end of the Westercon where they are ratified. A motion to Repeal the Bylaws is similar to an amendment; therefore, if this motion is passed by the Westercon 77 Business Meeting in 2025 and ratified by the Westercon 78 Business Meeting in 2026, the Bylaws are repealed as of the end of Westercon 78. However, this motion provides that should sites be selected for Westercon 79 and 80, those two conventions shall still be held, but they will not conduct Site Selection or host a Business Meeting. As of the conclusion of Westercon 80, there will be no future sites selected for Westercon. LASFS, as owner of the Westercon service mark, could decide what to do with the name. They could abandon it, sell it, form a new convention, apply it to an existing convention, or otherwise dispose of it as they wish.
(4) GOOD GRIEF. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more unappealing book cover. Unfortunately, it’s All Systems Red’s new ebook cover.
Some cattle ranchers opened a UFO “watchtower” 25 years ago in a remote Colorado valley to make some extra money. Now it draws about 10,000 visitors a year and made one who started it a believer….
DAN BOYCE, BYLINE: The San Luis Valley is a vast, high desert plain ringed by sweeping mountain ranges. It’s just a little bit smaller than the state of New Jersey, but only about 50,000 people live here. And back in the late ’90s, Judy Messoline and her partner were out here barely getting by raising their 75 cows.
JUDY MESSOLINE: They don’t eat sand real well, ’bout broke us from having to buy the hay for them.
BOYCE: They weren’t sure what they were going to do.
MESSOLINE: And one of the farmers came in one day and he said, you know what? You need to put up that UFO watchtower you giggled about. You’d have fun…
… Beside the highway, a green alien made of sheet metal points the way….
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
April 30, 1973 — Naomi Novik, 52.
By Paul Weimer: It begins with Dragons, of course. Unsurprising to be sure.
The high concept of Temeraire…Napoleonic Wars with Dragons, drew me to that series immediately. How could I resist a logline like that. While I eventually was a little disappointed in how little alternate historical content there was in the series (history trending toward ours, even with Dragons, always felt to me like a missed opportunity), the Dragons themselves always captivated and excited me. It’s still a high concept with legs, and the many varieties and personalities of the various dragons in the series helped to keep me reading book after book in the series. And even as recent as last year, it still spawns books set in the Napoleonic era with magic of various kinds. Magicians with the Napoleonic Wars. Vampires with the Napoleonic Wars. Magical Romance with the Napoleonic Wars. Temeraire helped birth and nurture an entire host of sub-sub-genres. The long simmering interest in the period and its genre-adjacent nature was dragged forever into the SFF orbit thereby. Dragons and Napoleonic Wars. What a concept.
But Naomi Novik is far more than Dragons, even if Uprooted has a very different Dragon, it is much more in the mold of a fairy tale. Spinning Silver, of course, showed me that Novik could go full on fairy tale and make it stick and make it real and make it gorgeous. It’s diametrically different in tone and writing than the Temeraire books, and yet, indubitably her work.
The Scholomance books, however, I truly and complete appreciate. After the awful taste in my mouth by a certain broken step of a billionaire author, I admit that I a bit hesitant to go for another magical school book, even from Novik. Could Novik actually help redeem the sub-sub-genre for me? I waited a bit on A Deadly Education, first in the series. The poisoned tree of the sub-sub-genre after all. And could the book escape the shadow of its huge predecessor? It turns out to be absolutely yes, by having older protagonists, and a literally feral feel to the titular school.
This is not a happy school of light magic, hijinks and camaraderie, but a deadly proving ground that getting out of is not as easy as you think. There are hungry things in the school, deadly competition from fellow students, and the school itself might be trying to eat you and your tasty magic. The whole idea of young magicians drawing all sorts of nasty in their broadcasting reminds me a bit of how magic works in the Stross Laundry Files verse and those books may have colored my perception a bit of the Scholomance as an institution.
And of course, by the third book, once out, our protagonist has to do something even harder and El must find a way back into the deadly school. It is a neat circular path from the first book and it completes the series very nicely.
Magical Schools are viable again (c.f. The more recent and forthcoming The Incandescent by Emily Tesh) but I maintain that it is Novik’s series that has helped pull it out of the much of the aforementioned billionaire’s grasp and given new and recent models for magical schools (not to forget older models such as Diane Duane of course).
The forthcoming Summer War sounds like another coming of age story from Novik (she is rather practiced and good at them, no?) and I look forward to it.
A federal magistrate judge in Michigan called the use of this logo on every page of a lawsuit “distracting.”Dragon Lawyers
A purple dragon dressed in a business suit seemed like a natural choice for a logo when Jacob A. Perrone, a lawyer in East Lansing, Mich., recently opened a new firm and named it Dragon Lawyers.
He noted that some lawyers liked to call themselves “bulldogs” and said the dragon symbolized “aggressive representation.”
But a federal magistrate judge, Ray Kent, was not impressed. He was so disgusted by the dragon that he struck a lawsuit filed by Mr. Perrone on behalf of an inmate who had accused jail officials in Clinton County, Mich., of being “deliberately indifferent” to her when she started vomiting last year.
“Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent,” Judge Kent wrote. “The Court is not a cartoon.”…
… The judge’s order prompted some amusement in legal circles after it was reported by The Volokh Conspiracy blog under the headline, “Exit the Dragon.” Another legal blog, Lowering the Bar, also picked up the story, and commented, “So many things people shouldn’t be doing, so little time.”…
…The cast of Thunderbolts* is already strong, with Florence Hugh and Sebastian Stan leading a team of Marvel’s anti-heroes. As with any superhero movie, we can expect lots of amazing digital effects to make the impossible come to life, but what’s exciting about this film is just how much of it was shot practically. Video footage shot on an iPhone by director Jake Schreier and posted to Instagram shows that a lot of the stunts and action were done in camera….
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Rich Lynch, N., Lloyd Penney, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
(1) A RECOMMENDATION. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog has posted a review of Speculative Whiteness titled “The Nerd Reich”.
…[The sff] genre often portrays societies where eggheads and dweebs are central in the fate of society. Intellectual elites or highly skilled individuals dominate, reflecting a vision where scientific knowledge and technical prowess are the ultimate sources of power. It is not lost on us that these “nerds” are mostly depicted as male and white.
In his recent book Speculative Whiteness, Jordan S. Carroll tackles the problematic consequences of this legacy. The book traces a history of the ways in which the genre was and continues to be co-opted by the alt-right.
It’s an excellent work, and probably the most important book about science fiction written this year….
The cover price is just $20, however, its publisher, the University of Minnesota Press, has made the entire book available to read online for free here. This is UMP’s description of Speculative Whiteness:
Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future.
(2) REMAIN CALM. “’Doctor Who has not been shelved’ – BBC responds to rumours” – Radio Times covers the official statement. And heck, I hadn’t even heard the rumor yet! (Probably because all of you are too smart to pass along links from The Sun.)
The BBC has assured Doctor Who fans that the sci-fi drama has not been cancelled, following an “incorrect” tabloid report.
The Sun stirred up concern that the long-running series was to go dormant again for between five and ten years, as it previously did after Sylvester McCoy’s final season – and once again after Paul McGann’s 1996 standalone film.
The speculation comes after perceived disappointment over Doctor Who season 14’s viewing figures, although the BBC and showrunner Russell T Davies have previously drawn attention to the show’s strong engagement from younger viewers.
The Sun’s anonymous source claimed that star Ncuti Gatwa was eyeing a move to Los Angeles to pursue Hollywood work – and that he had filmed a regeneration sequence for the end of the current run.
However, a spokesperson for Doctor Who commented: “This story is incorrect, Doctor Who has not been shelved. As we have previously stated, the decision on season 3 will be made after season 2 airs.
“The deal with Disney Plus was for 26 episodes – and exactly half of those still have to transmit. And as for the rest, we never comment on the Doctor and future storylines.”…
… Addressing the show’s ratings, Davies said last year: “In coming back, I wanted to make it simpler and I wanted to make it younger. Those two things are often not discussed – you read reactions to it and people are missing that.
“It’s simpler and younger – and it is working. The under-16s and the 16-34 audience as well is massive. It’s not doing that well in the ratings, but it is doing phenomenally well with the younger audience that we wanted.”
Doctor Who season 15 – also known as season 2 – is expected to premiere in May 2025, with Gatwa returning alongside Boom’s Varada Sethu as a new companion and former co-star Millie Gibson….
(3) THE BLACK FANTASTIC ONLINE PANEL IS TOMORROW. The Library of America will host an online event featuring Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and andré carrington, “The Black Fantastic: The New Wave of Afrofuturist Fiction Registration”, on Wednesday, February 19 from 6:00-7:00 p.m. Eastern. RSVP at the link. Contribution to attend: $5 (can be applied toward purchase of The Black Fantastic or any other book on the LOA Web Store.)
A new wave of science fiction and fantasy by Black writers has burst onto the American literary scene in recent decades: tales of cosmic travel, vampires, and alternate timelines set in profound social and psychological orbits. Building on the legacy of titans Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, these visionary writers root their imagination of other worlds in the multilayered realities of Black history and experience.
Award-winning SF authors Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah join andré carrington, editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, for a conversation about genre, influence, and the fascinating and phantasmagoric universes conjured by these new voices on the vanguard of American fiction.
Winner: Hazel Milla from North Carolina for the story “Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy”
Runner-up: Michael Burianyk from Nice, France for the story “The Witches of Kyiv”
Runner-up: Bailey Maybray from Somerville, MA for the story “Hook, Line, and Clinker”
Runner-up: Brad Halverson of Utah for the story “Top Dog”
Honorable Mention: Veronika Majerová from Bratislava, Slovakia for the story “Sleepwalker’s Survival Guide”
Honorable Mention: E. R. Cook from Westminster, CO for the story “Metamorphi”
Honorable Mention: Jun Schultz of Cambridge, Massachusetts for the story “The Strid”
There were 45 entries in this year’s contest. The final judges were Jasper Fforde (B62 Guest of Honor), Kelley Armstrong (B62 Special Guest) and E. C. Ambrose (author and teacher).
(5) FUN WHILE IT LASTED. [Item by Steve Green.] The Hungry Hobbit, a Birmingham cafe neighbouring Sarehole Mill (inspiration for Tolkien’s ‘Shire’) was famously forced by New Line Cinema (producers of the Lord of the Rings movies) to change its name to the Hungry Hobb, even though ‘hobbit’ is apparently not a trademarked term. At some point, this was further shortened to the Hungry Hob, and now I learn the business closed in late October 2024. There was an announcement on Facebook, which I’m not on. A fried chicken outlet now occupies on the site.
(6) YOUNG EYEBALLS ON THE JOB. James Davis Nicoll recently had the Young People Read Old SFFpanel react to Eleanor Arnason’s 1974 Nebula finalist The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons.
…Warlord has been anthologized many times in the half century since it first saw print. I own it in three anthologies and one collection. No surprise. Rereading Warlord, I see themes relevant to the world in which we now live… as much as I might wish that were not the case.
But will young eyes see the same story I do? Let’s find out!
…Lethem digs into his reasons on re-reexamining the Brooklyn he wrote about 20 years earlier in The Fortress of Solitude, but doing so this time with the tools of a journalist including long interviews conducted amid the dislocation and isolation of the COVID lockdown, and much more:
“One of the things I was really interested in was the idea of collective psychic experience, that that people go through things in a space together and then they don’t even know what part of it is really in their own head, and what was pushed in, stuck in there, from someone else. In a way, it is a typical New York thing. We were all there, right, when Mike Piazza hit the home run after 9/11? Every one of us, 9 million people were in the stadium that day. Well, we weren’t all there. We didn’t even all have the TV on. But somehow, retroactively, you fit yourself to this experience because it’s been had so intensely by other people that you’re confused about whether it was you or someone else who was there.
“And this was true for me in exploring the myths of a neighborhood and the myths on the street: individual moments of violence or confrontation or trauma on the street like that day that this guy put this other guy in a head lock and then he pulled out a knife. Somehow, we were all on that street corner. “I saw it with my own eyes!” Well, that isn’t true. There wasn’t some, stadium full of people watching this thing. It happened in a fugitive instant, but somehow we were all firsthand witnesses. So this idea that this transmission of mythic collective experience, this was a lot of what my questions for people were about: Did something that we all remember really happen? And if so, who did it happen to? Maybe I was the victim or maybe I was just a bystander. I don’t know…“
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
February 18, 1919 — Jack Palance. (Died 2006.)
Jack Palance in 1954.
Let’s talk about Jack Palance who was born of Ukrainian immigrant parents with name of Volodymyr Palahniuk. His professional surname was actually a derivative of his original name. While guesting on What’s My Line?, he noted that no one could pronounce his last name, and how it was suggested that he be called Palanski but instead that he decided just to use Palance instead. He didn’t say where his first name came from.
(OK nitpickers, I do not want to hear from you. Seriously, I don’t. His career makes a gaggle of overly catnapped kittens playing with skeins of yarn with lots of lanolin still on it look simple by comparison so I may or may not have knitted it properly here, so bear with my version of it.)
Surprisingly it looks like that he got his start in our end of things in television performances and relatively late as they started in the Sixties with the first one being Jabberwock on a musical version of Alice Through the Looking Glass. I’m sure I want to see that as it had Jimmy Durante as Humpty Dumpty, and the Smothers Brothers as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Next up was a Canadian production with him in the title role of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that in turn saw him being the lead in Dracula, also known as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dan Curtis’ Dracula, the last when the ego of the Director got way, way too big.
Jack Palance as Dracula (1973)
I’m going to digress here because it’s so fascinating. In 1963, The Greatest Show on Earth first aired. This Circus drama had Johnny Slate as the big boss who keeps the circus running as it moves from town to town. It was produced by Desilu, the production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Sr. It lasted but one season as it was up against shows by Jack Benny and Richard Boone.
A bit of hard SF was next, Cyborg 2, released in other countries as Glass Shadow, creative but terribly uninformative, where he’s Mercy, an old renegade cyborg.
Rod Serling and Jack Palance in 1957
Remember my Birthday on the wonderful Carol Serling? Well, he was in The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics film that she made possible as Dr. Jeremy Wheaton in “Where the Dead Are”.
If Treasure Island counts as genre and yes I do count it in my personal canon, then his role as Long John Silver is definitely canon.
He got to play Ebenezer Scrooge in Ebenezer. Now the fun part is that it’s set in the Old West, where he is the most greedy, corrupt and mean-spirited crook in the old West obviously, he sees no value in “Holiday Humbug” by several reviewers. This film I went to look up on Rotten Tomatoes, but no rating there.
Not at all shockingly to me, he shows up on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. where he plays a character of Louis Strago in a two-parter “The Concrete Overcoat Affair” which got re-edited as “The Spy in the Green Hat”.
A bit of horror was next in Tales of the Haunted as Stokes in “Evil Stalks This House” was up late in career.
Finally for roles that I’m reasonably sure were of genre interest, he was on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as Kaleel in the “Planet of the Slave Girls” episode.
One more gig for him related to genre or at least genre adjacent, though not as a performer, but as the host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for four years. He had three different co-hosts from season to season, including his daughter, Holly Palance, actress Catherine Shirriff, and finally singer Marie Osmond.
The New York Public Library is opening up its archives of Joan Didion and her husband Gregory Dunne to the public beginning March 26.
The Library acquired the late writers’ archives in 2023, just over three years since Didion’s 2021 death at age 87. Dunne died in 2003, aged 71.
The dual collection comprises a total of 336 boxes “most of which have never been seen publicly” and which represents “the most comprehensive collection of the authors’ materials” according to the library’s announcement.
These materials feature a vast array of both professional and personal documents from the couples’ lives, including six decades of correspondence, hundreds of photographs and 26 screenplay drafts the pair worked on together. The 1971 film “The Panic in Needle Park” and 1976’s “A Star Is Born” are among them. Visitors will also find annotated typescripts from Didion’s political reporting in the 1980s and ‘90s, and reference material for her books “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights.”…
There aren’t many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelight’s Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly fiery and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, “It doesn’t matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that’s refreshing – but isn’t it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!”
Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares’ adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war…
… He soon took his evolving prototype to a respected game studio in Stockholm – Starbreeze. “They were like, ‘Well, maybe you can do this as a kind of test project.’ But I’m like, fuck a test, I’m going to do the whole thing!”
That passion fuelled a year and a half of intense work, with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons being released in 2013. The co-op adventure about siblings embarking on a dangerous journey to find a cure for their sick father has now sold over 10m copies. Despite its success, many in Sweden were baffled by his artistic pivot, a transition for Fares that felt natural. “With movies, I came to a point where I felt that the passion really wasn’t there. Passion lead me to video games. It was very challenging being new in the industry and coming in with a different approach – wanting to create new mechanics. Today it’s different because [people] listen to me, but it was very hard in the beginning.”…
(12) A CULTURE WARRIOR MUSTERS OUT. Doris V. Sutherland has surprisingly devoted a full article to “The Brief Life of the Helicon Awards”. I say “surprisingly” because this was simply an award made up by Richard Paolinelli so he could give it to friends and authors he wanted to ingratiate himself with. (And that worked, because writers can’t resist anything labeled an “award” — David Weber thanked him online for his.) I have followed the Helicon Awards from start to finish – Paolinelli says it is being retired this year — and did not think its pretentions were even worth making fun of anymore. But fine minds can differ…
…Even the names chosen for some of the award categories serve as battle-standards for the culture war. The original Helicon category line-up included a Laura Ingalls Wilder New Author Award, a Melvil Dewey Innovation Award and Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award.
For context, in 2018 the US Association for Library Service to Children removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from an award for children’s literature in response to a controversy regarding racial attitudes in her writing, while 2019 saw Melvil Dewey’s name stricken from an American Library Association award over his history of racism, antisemitism and sexual harassment. (The Frank Herbert Award would appear to be the odd-one-out, as I’m not aware of Herbert having been particularly controversial circa 2019.)
In 2020, after Worldcon’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer was renamed (again, because of its namesake’s racist attitudes) the Helicon Society introduced the John W. Campbell Diversity in SFF Award. This was around for three years, the winners being Larry Correia (founder of the Sad Puppies), Orson Scott Card (controversial for his homophobia) and J. K. Rowling (no introduction needed). When the category was retired, Paolinelli admitted on his blog that it served as a “trolling the SJWs award”….
(13) RETURN ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. [Item by Steven French.] Another argument for why Oumuamua was (most likely) not an alien spacecraft. “Many stars could have sent us ‘Oumuamua” reports Phys.Org. And here’s the take-home message:
Interstellar space may therefore be full of dagger-shaped shards of rock and ice (an exaggeration, but a fun quote for dinner parties nonetheless).
Faced with a perilous mission to save the earth, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck eschew confidence… “How could we possibly screw this up?” How could they not? …
…In the brand-new 2D animated sci-fi buddy action comedy, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck turn into unlikely heroes when their antics at the local bubble gum factory uncover a secret alien mind control plot. Against all odds, the two are determined to save their town (and the world!)… that is if they don’t drive each other crazy in the process….
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Olav Rokne, Steve Green, Cathy Green, Steven Lee, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Olav Rokne.]
By Cat Eldridge: Yes, It’s the Birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien. So I asked a lot of folks that I knew what their favorite works by him were.
Obvious quick note — my choice is The Hobbit which I must’ve read or listened to at least a dozen times over the years. The BBC has a stellar audio version which I have listened to several times as well.
So now let’s see what my respondents had to say.
Peter Beagle says:
“You mean my favorite writing by Tolkien? Probably the story of Beren and Luthien, which I’ve always loved – or maybe the one now published as The Children of Hurin. One or the other.”
Cora Buhlertis one of the Filers who gave an answer:
“The first Tolkien I actually read was The Hobbit, in an East German edition with the illustrations from the Soviet edition. I got it as a present from my Great-Aunt Metel from East Germany, who often sent me books for Christmas and my birthday. It’s still somewhere in a box on my parents’ attic.
“I liked The Hobbit a lot, but I didn’t know there were more stories set in Middle Earth, until several years later, when I spotted The Lord of the Rings at a classmate’s place and borrowed it from him. As a teenager, I had a thing for mythology and read my way through the Nibelungenlied, the Odysseyand the Iliad, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, etc… Lord of the Rings fit right into that context and I enjoyed it even more than I had enjoyed The Hobbit.
“I didn’t read the essay “On Fairy Stories” until university, when I cited it in a paper I wrote for a class. Now I had been educated in an environment which considered the traditional Grimm’s fairy tales too brutal and unsuitable for children (luckily, my parents ignored that and told/read them to me anyway) and which viewed fantasy and science fiction or any kind of genre fiction as escapist trash and potentially harmful. I got regurgitated version of this from my teachers at school and in university I was exposed to the 1970s leftwing pop culture criticism where those ideas had originated. However, I didn’t believe that fairy tales were bad and that SFF was escapist trash, so I was thrilled to read “On Fairy Stories” and find that Tolkien, who surely was considered beyond reproach, agreeing with me.”
Lis Carey was our next Filer:
“I think I have to say that The Hobbit is my favorite Tolkien. I really do identify with Bilbo’s desire to stay home, and enjoy his cozy hobbit hole and its comforts, in his comfortable, familiar neighborhood. Yet, against his better judgment, he is lured into going on an adventure (always a bad idea, adventures) with the dwarves, and finds out just how resilient he is, his unexpected bravery, his ingenuity when faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges (“…he was chased by wolves, lost in the forest, escaped in a barrel from the elf-king’s hall…”) (yes, I love The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, too.) He finds resources in himself that he never suspected–and at the end, he still goes home, to deal with his annoying relatives and enjoy his home. None of this “and now I will abandon everything I ever cared about, to be a completely different person in a different life.””
It’s been a long time for Ellen Datlowsince she read any Tolkien, so she says:
“I haven’t read him in so long I don’t remember – I loved all three of the LOTR trilogy and The Hobbit but don’t remember exactly why.” She added in a conversation recently that “I loved his world building from what I recall, but the movies-which I saw much more recently-have overshadowed the books for me. And the movies inspired a major crush on Viggo Mortensen. :-)”
Pamela Dean says she “unreservedly loves The Lord of the Rings, the translation of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’ and ‘On Fairy-Stories’.”
Once again, The Hobbit proves popular as Jasper Fforde says :
“It’s The Hobbit, because it’s the only one I’ve read – I liked it a great deal but was never really into spells, wizards and trolls, so never took it any further.”
Elizabeth Hand gave a lengthy reply:
“I’d probably have to say The Lord of the Rings, which I’ve read it countless times over the last forty years. It imprinted on me at such an early age — I had the good luck to read it as a kid in the 1960s, when it was still a cult novel, and you had a real sense that you were in some secret, marvelous group of insiders who had visited a place not everyone knew about. Maybe kids discovering it today still have that feeling, in spite of the success of the movies (which I love). I hope so. But I also find that, as I’ve gotten older, I’m far more drawn to reread other works, especially in The Complete History of Middle Earth and The Silmarillion (we have very long Tolkien shelves here).
I love the Beren & Luthien material, and also the various accounts of Turin, which recently were republished as The Children of Hurin. The dark tone of all of it, the tragic cast and also the recurring motifs involving elves and mortal lovers — great stuff. It doesn’t serve the function of comfort reading that LOTR does, and because I’m not so familiar with the stories I can still read them with something like my original sense of discovery.
The breadth and depth of Tolkien’s achievement really becomes apparent when one reads The Complete History — 13 volumes, including an Index. Every time I go back to them I think, I could be learning Greek, or Ancient Egyptian, something that has to do with the real world. But then, I’m continually so amazed by what this one man came up with, the intensity and single mindedness of his obsession. And I get sucked into it all over again.”
Gwyneth Jones says her favorite work is The Lord Of The Rings:
“Why — Because I read it when I was a child, in bed with bronchitis. My mother brought me the three big volumes, successively, from the library, I’d never met anything like it, and it was just wonderful entertainment for a sick child. I grew out of LOTR, but will never forget that thrill. More why: I’ve never felt the slightest temptation to open the massive prequels and spin-offs of Middle Earth fantasy, I just don’t have that gene, and I feel the Tolkien industry doesn’t need my money. And the other works are either too scholarly, or everything about them is represented in LOTR anyway. I admired ‘Tree and Leaf’ when I read it, long ago, but I’m not sure if I still would.”
Naomi Kritzer likes The Hobbit quite a bit:
“When I was thirteen, I somehow got into the habit of reading bedtime stories to my younger brother, who was seven. (I say “somehow” because my parents had previously been the ones to do this. How and why did I take over? I’m not sure. Possibly it was as simple as, “my parents went out one evening, leaving me to babysit, and that night I read my brother the first chapter of a novel, and the next night he wanted the second.”) We were living in a furnished rental house at the time (my parents were academics, and we were living in the UK that year), and one of the available books was The Hobbit. I read it to my brother. I hadn’t read it previously. I think there are a lot of people whose first exposure to Tolkien was being read to, but I’m not sure how many people my age got their first exposure by reading it to someone else. It’s a truly excellent way to be introduced to Tolkien.”
OR Melling says for her it’s The Lord of the Rings: ‘
“As a child, I loved reading fantasy – CS Lewis, E Nesbit, JM Barrie and so on – but when the librarian offered me The Hobbit and said “it’s about little men with hairy feet” I recall giving her one of those withering looks only children can give. Why on earth would I want to read a book about men with hairy feet? I did finally read The Hobbit when I was 12, after I had read The Lord of the Rings, and discovered that my initial suspicion was correct. I did not like the book at all, particularly its depiction of the elves. This was a great surprise, of course, considering that I had absolutely fallen in love with The Lord of the Rings. It is still one of my favourite books to this day. Aside from The Silmarillion – which I endured like all faithful fans – I have not read any other of Tolkien’s works.’”
James Davis Nicoll has a confession:
“I am very embarrassed to admit I’ve read only 2 JRRTs: LOTR and The Hobbit. LOTRs is far more ambitious and by any reasonable measure better but I enjoyed The Hobbit more. I remember as a teen being surprised that he didn’t end at what would have been the conventional ending, but rather continued on to show the aftermath of victory.”
Cat Rambo picked The Hobbit:
“I will always love The Hobbit, because it taught me what a pleasure reading could be. My babysitter Bernadette was reading it to me, a chapter or so every time she came, and I finally started sneaking chapters because I couldn’t stand not knowing what was happening next. There were other books I loved throughout my childhood, but The Hobbit will always hold center place in that court.”
Catherynne M. Valente picked The Silmarillion:
“I love The Lord of the Rings. I was once a hardcore Sindarin-speaking LoTR geek, in the days of my misbegotten youth. It is a vast and important book. But I have to say that I feel the book is incomplete without The Silmarillion, which provides a depth and mythology, an understanding of the forces at work, a breadth and beauty that LoTR does not have on its own. I am one of the few who loves The Silmarillion for itself, devoured it in one sitting, had no trouble with the archaic language. It should get more love than it does.”
Our final Filer is Paul Weimer who states:
“I am going to go with a sidewise choice. While LOTR and the Hobbit are some of my earliest and most beloved of all SFF that I have ever read, the piece by Tolkien that comes back to my mind again and again is the story of Beren and Luthien. We get the story in a number of ways and forms :the small fragments we see in Lord of the Rings (or the tiny bit in the movie), the longer tale told in the Silmarillion, and the alternate and evolving versions seen in the extended histories of Middle Earth and his letters, In the end this love story between man and elf, mortal and immortal, is in many ways the story of Tolkien, more than the story of a Hobbit, or of the One Ring. It is very telling that Tolkien and his wife’s gravestone name check themselves as Beren and Luthien. It moved me the first time I read the full story, and it moves me still.”
And Jane Yolen finishes the choices off by saying it’s The Hobbit for her:
“While it’s true that The Lord of the Rings is his masterwork and The Hobbit his first attempt at writing (and that, some say witheringly, for children) I have to admit I adore The Hobbit. It has adventure, wonderful characters, fine pacing and spacing, some really scary bits (my daughter ran screaming from the room when the trolls grabbed the ponies, and she refused to hear the rest of it.) And if I could ever write a chapter as good as the Riddles in the Dark chapter I would never have to write again.”
(1) DISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC. Ted Chiang received the Humanist Inquiry & Innovation Award at the American Humanist Association’s 83rd Annual Conference, held virtually in September 2024. “This award honors those who have advanced human understanding and innovation in ways that uphold humanist values, work that exemplifies the power of inquiry and innovation to promote human dignity, freedom and progress.” This text is excerpted from Chiang’s acceptance speech at the Conference: “The Distinction Between Imaginary Science and Magic” at TheHumanist.com.
…The reason these [two example] stories feel different to me has to do with the way these stories treat this impossibility. One feels like it’s a story about an imaginary scientific discovery, while the other one feels like it’s a story about magic. I think that the difference in the way these stories feel points to something significant. If I’m told that a phenomenon is dependent on the practitioner, that makes me think it’s magic, because think of the ways that magic is commonly depicted.
Sometimes magic works only for people born with an innate gift. Sometimes magic only works for people who have purified their soul through years of study. Sometimes magic only works for people who have good intentions, or it works differently for different people, depending on whether their intentions are good or bad. Sometimes magic requires intense concentration to be effective, or it requires that you make a sacrifice.
None of these things are true of scientific phenomena. When you pass a magnet through a coil of wire, electric current flows no matter who your parents are or whether your intentions are good or bad. You don’t have to concentrate hard or offer a sacrifice in order for a light bulb to turn on. Electricity does not care.
One of the central criteria for a scientific result is that it be reproducible, that it be it can be recreated anywhere by anyone. It does not depend on a specific person’s presence or participation. If an experiment only works when one particular person conducts it, then we discard that data as spurious. When radio waves were first discovered, they might have seemed magical to the casual observer and the scientists who first transmitted messages via radio might have seemed like wizards because they were able to communicate over long distances using an invisible medium, but because radio waves are reproducible, because they don’t rely on any particular person’s participation, it eventually became possible to build radio transmitters and receivers by the thousands and then the millions, and now, literally anyone can use a radio. It is no longer restricted to a handful of scientists….
(2) WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE THINK. James Davis Nicoll recently presented George R. R. Martin’s “With Morning Comes Mistfall” (1973) to the Young People Read Old SFFpanel.
November’s Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists features George R. R. Martin’s “With Morning Comes Mistfall”. First published in the May 1973 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, “Mistfall” was nominated for the Nebula as well as the Hugo, losing the first to “ Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death”, and the second to Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”.
I first encountered “Mistfall” in Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Third Annual Collection.
I disagreed strongly with the apparent thesis — that looking for answers to interesting questions is the act of a buzzkill — but enjoyed the story enough start relentlessly hunting down Martin stories. One result is that I own at least three copies of this particular story, in the del Rey anthology, in A Song for Lya and Other Stories1, and in Portraits of His Children. I had the Analog back-issue until a flood ate my 1970s magazine collection. I have a shelf of Martin works and this story is why.
Of course, there’s no guarantee the Young People will like the same stuff I enjoyed. Let’s find out what they thought….
Warner Bros. Discovery announced that its upcoming “Harry Potter” series will start shooting this summer at Leavesden, where the movies were also filmed.
During a presentation at the Warner Bros. Discovery’s headquarters in London on Thursday, showrunner Francesca Gardiner and director Mark Mylod revealed that the show had auditioned 32,000 kids for the lead roles, and that the casting team is currently reviewing between 500 and 1,000 audition tapes per day with the intent to watch every single one. Though he affirmed they haven’t made any final choices in regards to casting yet, Mylod said the next step will be to “workshop with some of our shortlisted candidates” in January.
Gardiner and Mylod also said they will be sticking to correct canonical ages for the characters: Severus Snape (potentially being played by Paapa Essiedu) will be in his 30s, while James and Lily Potter will be younger, as they were only 21 when they died. Mylod teased that for the adult characters, he’s looking to continue the tradition of “brilliant theater actors in the U.K.,” with the young actors of course all being newcomers….
… The run-up to the series has not been without controversy, however, as book author J.K. Rowling has continued to cause backlash with her views on transgender identity. However, HBO has stood by her side, telling Variety in a statement last month: “J.K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views. We will remain focused on the development of the new series, which will only benefit from her involvement.”
At Thursday’s event, HBO chief Casey Bloys doubled down on that sentiment, saying that he’s “totally comfortable” with Rowling’s involvement and “not concerned about consumer response.”…
But as Chris Barkley said when he sent the link, “Well, heh, he SHOULD BE concerned….”
World War Three killed nine out of ten people, but enough infrastructure survived to support reliable hibernation. This is good news for terminally ill Ross. He can be placed into suspended animation until a cure is found for his disease. The results are a mixed success. Ross wakes, now healthy, to discover that humans have, during his long slumber, not only annihilated themselves but almost all life on Earth.
Fortune smiles on Ross. First, life may be (mostly) dead but there is an army of robots to carry out his orders. Second, thanks to the upturned cuffs of the clothes he wore on his way to cold sleep, a few seeds survived the apocalypse. Third, thanks to suspended animation, Ross has all the time he needs to oversee Earth’s terraforming… although he might be surprised to learn how long that will take.
For the most part, this short novel is a tribute to what one human can accomplish, given only determination, knowledge, and a vast army of relentlessly obedient, highly advanced robots. That said, Second Ending may feature the longest timescale needed for terraforming ever featured in a science fiction novel.
(5) I CAN’T SAY NO. Camestros Felapton knows readers can’t resist taking the hook dangled in “Robot Fabulas: Introduction”: “Welcome to Robot Fabulas, a series that is never quite about what it appears to be about”… I certainly can’t.
…This is an attempt to trace a history of science fiction by following one niche part of science fiction. Many things can be science fiction but rockets, space travel, time travel and robots all share a common quality that even when they discussed in factual terms (as theories or in some cases actualities) they have a science fictional quality to them.
The premise of Robot Fabulas is that there is a class of stories that I am calling “robot stories” that share a group of features to them. That these stories long predate anything we might call science fiction in the modern sense but which clearly influenced modern science fiction. We can recognise Pinocchio in Star Trek’s Commander Data and we can recognise Victor Frankenstein in Data’s inventor Doctor Noonien Soong. How ancient stories rooted in folk tales, legends or myth evolved into modern stories about invention, technology is the story of science fiction. I will follow robot stories because I can see that path from the past to the future most clearly.
One of the masterminds behind Doctor Who has warned that the more AI content is used for creative purposes the worse its output will be because it “eats its own tail”.
Ahead of the Doctor Who Christmas special, eagerly awaited by fans as a centrepiece of BBC1’s festive schedule, Steven Moffat made the comments in discussion with fellow showrunner Russell T Davies.
“Human beings are amazingly cheap, we’re knocking out human beings every day. And unlike anything else in history, the more we use it, the less good it is,” Moffat told the Radio Times. “Because the more content that is out there produced by AI, the more it absorbs its own content, and eats its own tail.”
Davies, who was responsible for the modern revival of Doctor Who in 2005 and returned as showrunner in 2022, had wondered whether AI would replace screenwriters.
He replied to Moffat: “Television has been run on those principles for a very long time. You’ve just described most networks!”
(7) APEX BRINGS ABOARD MANAGING EDITOR. Darian Bianco has accepted the position of Managing Editor for Apex Book Company.
As managing editor, Darian will oversee the production, marketing, and distribution of the imprint’s titles. She’ll also be involved with acquisitions and catalog management.
Darian started her career in publishing as an intern for Apex eight years ago. Most recently, she has been a writing instructor for the Reach Your Apex educational arm of the business.
Apex Book Company editor-in-chief Jason Sizemore says this about Darian: “Darian’s intellect, organizational skills, and editorial acumen will be a boon for the company.”
Darian Bianco currently works as an adjunct professor teaching English at Eastern Kentucky University. She holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio. She is also a graduate of the 2022-2023 season of the Author’s Academy at the Carnegie Center, having worked with Ashley Blooms. Her novel-in-progress, Chatter, was one of five winners for issue six of Novel Slices. She is represented by Alexandra Levick of Writers House, LLC.
ChatGPT search—which is positioned as a competitor to search engines like Google and Bing—launched with a press release from OpenAI touting claims that the company had “collaborated extensively with the news industry” and “carefully listened to feedback” from certain news organizations that have signed content licensing agreements with the company. In contrast to the original rollout of ChatGPT, two years ago, when publishers learned that OpenAI had scraped their content without notice or consent to train its foundation models, this may seem like an improvement. OpenAI highlights the fact that it allows news publishers to decide whether they want their content to be included in their search results by specifying their preferences in a “robots.txt” file on its website.
But while the company presents inclusion in its search as an opportunity to “reach a broader audience,” a Tow Center analysis finds that publishers face the risk of their content being misattributed or misrepresented regardless of whether they allow OpenAI’s crawlers….
…In total, we pulled two hundred quotes from twenty publications and asked ChatGPT to identify the sources of each quote. We observed a spectrum of accuracy in the responses: some answers were entirely correct (i.e., accurately returned the publisher, date, and URL of the block quote we shared), many were entirely wrong, and some fell somewhere in between.
We anticipated that ChatGPT might struggle to answer some queries accurately, given that forty of the two hundred quotes were sourced from publishers who had blocked its search crawler. However, ChatGPT rarely gave any indication of its inability to produce an answer. Eager to please, the chatbot would sooner conjure a response out of thin air than admit it could not access an answer. In total, ChatGPT returned partially or entirely incorrect responses on a hundred and fifty-three occasions, though it only acknowledged an inability to accurately respond to a query seven times. Only in those seven outputs did the chatbot use qualifying words and phrases like “appears,” “it’s possible,” or “might,” or statements like “I couldn’t locate the exact article.”…
A year after the writers’ and actors’ strikes that stalled the film and television industry, production activity in New York City remains stuck in low gear, according to city data and interviews with more than a dozen local actors, writers, executives and crew members.
“It’s been totally dead,” said Max Casella, a series regular on “The Sopranos,” “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and other shows. “Nothing going on, no work, nothing.”
“There are just so many fewer ways to make a living in this industry now than ever,” said Nivedita Kulkarni, a comedian and actress with a 14-year career.
The past several years have been enormously challenging for many New Yorkers in the industry. First there were the pandemic shutdowns, which brought production to a halt. Then, there were the strikes that began in May 2023.
Nearly all the workers interviewed for this story described a dead summer and fall with few auditions and little work. In some cases, actors used to starring scenes have taken diminished roles, and minor actors or co-stars have taken work as background actors or extras.
Some have turned to trading cryptocurrencies and others have left the city altogether, no longer seeing it as a place where they might build a career in the industry.
“It’s not just a New York City shift, it’s an industry shift. It’s a national shift,” said Pat Kaufman, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.
Industry experts and sources expect the downturn to last several years at minimum, following larger changes in the entertainment industry’s business model. Many predict that New York City will likely remain a domestic production hotspot, but it may take years for employment to return to pre-pandemic levels.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Anniversary: December 5, 1977 — Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
Forty-seven years ago on CBC on this date, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas film first aired. It would premiere a year later in the States on HBO. It was based off of the children’s book of the same name by Russell Hoban and his wife Lillian Hoban. Russell Hoban you’ll no doubt recognize as the author of Riddley Walker which won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It was directed and produced by Jim Henson off the script by Jerry Juhl who was known for his work on The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street.
The Muppets voice cast was Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, Marilyn Sokol and Eren Ozker.
Paul Williams, who I was surprised to learn wrote Three Dog Night’s “An Old Fashioned Love Song” among quite a few other songs, composed the music and several songs here. This would not be his last such Muppets work as he would be involved in The Muppet Movie several years later among other of his Muppets projects.
Reception was very positive with the New York Times comparing it to The Wind in The Willows saying and “These really are the nicest folk on the river.” It was Christmas season, blame that comparison on too much eggnog made way too strong if you want. And AV Critic said that “it was “The kind of Christmas special you could wrap in tissue when the season’s over and store carefully in a box in the attic.”
Oh, and Bret McKenzie (you fans of The Hobbit films might recognize him) was writing the script and songs for a film adaptation of it which might be someday produced by The Jim Henson Company though it’s been years since that was announced.
Yes, the Suck Fairy very much liked it. She even looked at her iPad mini to see what the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes thought of it. She’s pleased to say that the more than five thousand people who had rated it gave it a hundred percent rating. After that, she put her iPad mini down, went back to stroking Pixel and watching the film. Again. Sentimental sop.
For some reason unlike most Muppet properties, it is not streaming on Disney+ but on Peacock, but then Jim Henson’s The Storyteller is there and as well, seasonally appropriate, It’s A Very Muppet Christmas too. Not at all Muppet, but How The Grinch Stole Christmasisas well.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Ink Pen thinks of it as an audition, not hot dogging.
…“He was an amazing writer. There was no one like Howard.” And it’s not as if Waldrop’s career was without acclaim. But his peers, including Martin, worried about his finances and health towards the end of his life. With the financial success Martin enjoyed thanks to Thrones, he wanted to strike a deal to turn some of Waldrop’s stories into short films, but it wasn’t easy.
“It’s hard to get anyone to finance a short film,” Martin tells THR. “Movie theaters don’t want to show short films. I own a movie theater myself, so I know that. And it’s hard to get the big studios to make them. I tried for a number of years… I finally gave up.”
Then the author decided to break “the cardinal rule of Hollywood.”
With Waldrop’s health deteriorating, Martin was determined to honor his friend by bringing his work to the big screen. “The cardinal rule of Hollywood is: never use your own money. I broke that. I [thought], ‘God damn it, I’m gonna use my own money,’” he adds. “So we put these films into production — three of them are now finished. Two more are in post-production.”
The Ugly Chickens, starring Felicia Day (Supernatural, The Guild), has been shot alongside adaptations of Waldrop’s short stories Mary-Margaret Road Grader and Night of the Cooters. The movies are now screening on the festival circuit, with Chickens already securing a best short film nomination at the HollyShorts Film Festival (the Oscar-qualifying short film fest based in Los Angeles) …
Caves of Qud isn’t a new game by any means. Over 15 years of development, Freehold Games has built a community of passionate players over a long period of early access. But on Wednesday, Caves of Qud finally enjoyed a 1.0 launch, and is available for sale on Steam, Itch.io, and GOG.
It’s not easy to categorize Caves of Qud, because it covers so much ground — quite literally, since it’s generating an entire world full of ancient ruins, toxic jungles, scattered settlements, mutants, beasts, clones, sentient bears, and mysterious robots. It’s advertised as a “science fantasy roguelike epic” and a “deep simulation” that allows the players to do basically anything. Thanks to all the technology and magic of the setting, that can be anything from arguing with a sentient plant to becoming a spider and trapping your enemies in webs.
The 1.0 update adds a tutorial to teach the basics of the game, which was sorely needed, and adds a final quest to the main questline that initiates the end of the game. There are several new music tracks, as well as sound effects. Players can also earn 40 new achievements, find new items, and enjoy lots of minor bug fixes and quality of life changes….
It’s true that fear is the mind-killer — but a laser blast from a giant robot can also be pretty lethal.
HBO’s upcoming prequel series Dune: Prophecy is set to explore the history of author Frank Herbert’s sci-fi universe, including something that’s never been seen on screen in any of the multiple movie adaptations of Dune — namely, the war against “thinking machines” that took place tens of thousands of years before the birth of Paul Atreides….
… But the whole reason there are “human computers” in the Dune universe in the first place is because the actual computers were all destroyed in a massive war! Viewers of Dune: Prophecy will see glimpses of that war in the opening moments of this Sunday’s premiere episode….
… The actual show is set years after the end of the Butlerian Jihad, but its lingering shadow hangs over the proceedings….
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman to be the next administrator of NASA….
…Isaacman made headlines earlier this year when he became the first private astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. The five-day mission took place using a capsule built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. During the flight, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis donned space suits supplied by the company and floated briefly outside the capsule.
It was Isaacman’s second trip to space using a SpaceX capsule. He has declined to say how much he’s paid the company for the two flights.
Isaacman is a friend of Musk, and his online payment company, Shift 4, has extensive financial ties to SpaceX. According to financial disclosure documents, Shift 4 had invested $27.5 million dollars in SpaceX as of 2021. That same year, Shift4 announced a five-year partnership that would make it the payment platform for Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.
If confirmed as NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee billions of dollars in contracts that the government has awarded to SpaceX. He would also be in a position to funnel more money to Musk’s company.
“Isaacman is likely to favor ambitious and innovative commercial projects,” says Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, which analyzes the space business. “Many of those projects could well be executed by SpaceX.”
In fact, in previous posts on Musk’s social media platform X, Isaacman appears to have shown a strong preference for SpaceX. He has supported allowing SpaceX to increase its launches out of California, after lawmakers there voted to restrict its flights from Vandenberg Air Force Base. He’s also been critical of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) to carry astronauts to the moon, as well as the agency’s decision to award a lunar landing contract to Blue Origin, the spaceflight company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos….
(17) ON THE ROAD. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The starship Enterprise ran on antimatter which sort of explains why Scotty looked a tad nervous when saying ‘the engines canna take it’. So consider today’s Nature which reports on “Antimatter being transported outside a lab for first time — in a van”
The volatile substance will be driven across the CERN campus in trucks to different facilities, giving scientists greater opportunities to study it….
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, N., Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
… Most awards are woefully unfit as weapons3. Authors with a mantlepiece loaded with award trophies would have few options if, say, they had to ward off an attacker with a handy trophy. But there are a few such options.
Before I list the top candidates for most lethal award trophy4, I should grant an honorable mention to the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, also known as the Skylark Award. The trophy looks no more dangerous than any random trophy, likely to break as soon as you hit someone with it. However, the trophy is topped by a perfectly functional lens through which sunlight can and has focused to start fires. This is why Skylark Award winner Jane Yolen has advised winners to put the Skylark “where the sun does not shine.” If I were assembling a list of SF trophies most useful for arson, the Skylark would be at the top…
To paraphrase Richard Pryor, I know that when a winner is walking through an airline terminal with a pointy Hugo Award in their hand “people get out of your way.”
(Nicoll omitted the otherwise obvious number one choice, Reddit r/Fantasy’s Stabby, because they’ve been on hiatus since 2021. Fair enough.)
…On a recent evening, Richard Unwin, a 44-year-old writer and actor, gathered four other “Doctor Who” fans at his apartment in East London to watch the first two episodes. They were a little nervous about what the Disney influence, and the need to cater to a new, international audience, might have done to their favorite program.
…“I am worried that they will Americanize it,” said George Norohna, a 61-year-old retired civil servant, who remembers the show as the first thing he ever saw on a color television. They were joined by the fantasy author Janelle McCurdy, 28, Francis Beveridge, a 27-year-old neuroscience researcher, and Beth Axford, 26, who writes for “Doctor Who Magazine,” a fan publication….
What does casting Gatwa as the Doctor mean to you?
MCCURDY I know there’s old school Doctor Who fans who might see it as just a token thing. But it means a lot to me as a Black woman.
UNWIN It’s the first time that the Doctor talks like I do, as a gay man.
MCCURDY I feel exactly the same, he’s talking like how I talk.
BEVERIDGE The Doctor has always appealed to gay men, because he’s a nonconventional male role model. So having the doctor be more queer has allowed people to identify that bit more closely with him.
(3) GONE IN SIXTY SECONDS. The trolls have found a new way to get at Patrick S. Tomlinson. He posted this on Facebook yesterday.
…The trailer shows young outcast Elphaba (Erivo) and the ever-popular Glinda (Grande) arriving at Shiz University, where they immediately clash. But their rivalry cannot keep them apart because Headmistress Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) wastes no time in assigning them as roommates….
(5) HUGO BOOK CLUB BLOG HVP IN SCOTS. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Last year, we were one of several Hugo Award finalists who ensured that our Hugo Voter Packet materials were available in the local language out of respect for the fact that the Worldcon was being held in China. With the Worldcon being held in Glasgow in 2024, we started thinking about the fact that there are significant minority languages in Scotland, but that they don’t garner the same sort of respect from outsiders.
Having made a couple of (possibly ill-considered) jokes about the matter, Amanda and I reached out to experts in Scots languages and dialects to learn more. In the end, we decided that (although not strictly necessary), having our Hugo Voter Packet available in Scots would be an appropriate gesture in recognition of the country’s linguistic diversity and distinct cultural identity that is different than any of the other British nations. As of today, thanks to the Scots Language Centre, that translation is complete and is available on our blog. A PDF of this will be prepared and sent to the Worldcon. “Hugo Book Club Blog: Hugo Packet Translated (2024)”.
Note: Scots is one of three native languages spoken in Scotland, the other two being English and Scottish Gaelic.
Time for another regular episode of the podcast, and this time we have more interview goodness from the Hugo- and Nebula-winning SF writer Robert J. Sawyer. We had so much fun talking to Rob about his new novel The Downloaded (see episode 40) that we decided to gather up our more general discussion into a separate segment. So here you will hear talk of Planet of the Apes, science fiction conferences, and much much more.
We also have a mostly Star Trek quiz, but with a few Star Wars questions thrown in to trip Phil up.
And the usual recommendations of past/present/future SF.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 16, 1969 — David Boreanaz, 55. David Boreanaz is one of the performers that I really like as an individual as himself, and always as a character, though sometimes better in some series.
Before I get to his genre roles, let me tell about about me about my favorite role by him. It’s Master Chief Special Warfare Operator Jason Hayes in the SEAL Team series. It’s a role that gives a depth of personality that mostly lacking in his previous role as Angel on his own series of Angel as he is executive producer here
David Boreanaz
at GalaxyCon Austin 2023.
The series tells the story of a team of Navy operatives called Bravo that do covert missions overseas, many of which, if you pardon my slang, are SNAFUed. It got more realistically portrayed when the series moved off CBS to Paramount + and the language restrictions were gone, so fuck and such language were allowed. Their personal lives of course get messily intertwined with their professional ones.
Speaking of Seeley Booth, let’s discuss Bones. I like the series as having seen all of it save the last season. Temperance Brennan and the other characters are mostly interesting, and her relationship with Seeley is fascinating.
The show itself? It’s is pseudoscience-science. Like such series that shows lots pretty, impressive technology, it’s not really able to do what the writers say it can. Yes, I’ve read the actual forensic experts critique such series. That it crosses over into the fantasy of the Sleepy Hollow series makes it genre in some manner. Seeley Booth actually will be on that series for an episode.
Now Seeley himself is great character. An FBI agent that is fun to watch and I think that Boreanaz early on figured out his character couldn’t be taken too seriously. He looks like an archetypal agent FBI — tall, muscular and handsome. He’s even a deeply religious man here , as he was raised and still is a practicing Catholic. Philadelphia born, the sports teams show up in the series. I like him at lot in this role as I do in the following series.
And that is on Angel, and not Buffy on the Vampire Slayer, where I thought he was was interesting but didn’t live up to his full potential as character so I’m going to skip over him there. Why Angel, you say? Because that series, like SEAL Team, was centered on him.
By the way, The “Smile Time” episode of the fifth season had the storyline of a television children’s show stealing the life forces of those children by hypnotizing them so when Angel goes to the studio to uncover the evil doings, he triggers a spell when entering there that transforms him into a puppet.
So, the ever so cool puppet done at time I now realize I should’ve bought. The cheapest mint one on eBay, and I think the price is quite reasonable given the Angel series aired twenty years ago, is now one hundred and twenty-five dollars.
But more than that and yes that was crucial to his development as a performer there, I thought the scripts there were far better than they were on Buffy. Oh. Buffy had its stellar storylines, but I think Angel just worked better in terms of pure ongoing storytelling than Buffy did. So that meant Angel there was a more rounded, interesting character there than he was on Buffy.
Finally, though not chronologically, he voiced Hal Jordan in Justice League: The New Frontier. In an episode of Bones, “The Pain in the Heart”, Seeley is in his bathtub reading a Green Lantern comic. Nice touch that was.
As always, this is not a full look at every genre role he did, so feel free to give me anything you feel I should have included here.
(9) SFF AUTHOR ON JEOPARDY! THIS MONTH. Ellen Klages will be on Jeopardy! on May 22 (and possibly subsequently) reports Steven H Silver.
(10) JEOPARDY! SFF REFERENCES. [By David Goldfarb.] Monday’s episode of Jeopardy! Masters and Tuesday’s episode of Jeopardy! had some more SFF-related questions. Here they are:
Jeopardy! 5/14/2024
Prequels & Sequels, $1600: Suzanne Collins tells the backstory of Coriolanus Snow in her 2020 “Hunger Games” prequel, “The Ballad of” these 2 animals
Ashley Atkin responded, “What are songbirds and snakes?”
Prequels & Sequels, $1200: A book with famous sequels begins, “In a hole in the ground, there lived” one of these
Ashley, “What is a hobbit?”
Prequels & Sequels, $2000: “The Infernal Devices” is a prequel trilogy to this Cassandra Clare series that includes “City of Bones” & “City of Ashes”
This was a triple stumper. The series is “The Mortal Instruments”.
Jeopardy! Masters 5/13/2024
Game 1, Double Jeopardy round:
Looking for Something to Read, $2000: Published in the 1880s, his utopian novel “Looking Backward” was set in the year 2000
Victoria Groce was up on her utopias, responding “Who’s Bellamy?”
Speaking My Language, $1200: This fictional language in “Game of Thrones” has more than a dozen different words for horse
James Holzhauer knew it was Dothraki.
Speaking My Language, $2000: “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was written in Akkadian, which supplanted this, considered the world’s oldest written language
This one went to Matt Amodio: “What’s Sumerian?”
Looking for Something to Read, $400: Chess, reverse imagery & the poem “Jabberwocky” appear in this sequel from the 1870s
Victoria got it: “What is ‘Through the Looking-Glass’?”
Game 2, Single Jeopardy round:
I’m Chris Pratt, $800: “I worked hard to lose 60 pounds to play Peter Quill, also known by this name, in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’. The toughest part — brace yourselves — I quit drinking beer.”
Amy Schneider sounded uncertain or even incredulous: “What is…Star-Lord?” But this was correct.
Mais Oui, French Lit, $400: The narrator of this children’s book believes the title royal is from out of town…asteroid B-612, to be Precise
It went to Yogesh Raut: “What is ‘The Little Prince’?”
(11) HALL OF FAMER’S LATEST. Matt Hughes writes fantasy, space opera, crime, and historical fiction. He has sold 24 novels as well as 100 works of short fiction. He’s won the Endeavour and Arthur Ellis Awards, and has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Hall of Fame
His new novel is The One:
Meet Luff Imbry, an insidiously clever thief, forger, and confidence man . . . He likes good wine, good food, and good stolen goods, and he always maintains the upper hand.
Luff Imbry returns from the weird planet Fulda, to which he was shanghaied by a mysterious enemy, only to find that an impostor has stolen from the strongroom at his private club collection of magical paraphernalia he acquired from a would-be thaumaturge.
That’s impossible, but Imbry has to deal with reality. He sets off on a quest to solve the mystery and recover his goods, bringing him into conflict with shadowy forces that are preparing for the great change, when the universe once again gives up on rationalism and embraces an age of magic.
The odds are against him, but Imbry is a great improvisor.
The book is available as a paperback or ebook from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.
…The fun catch? You won’t know which side you’ve got until you actually open the package. Each pack will feature one of two different color fillings: red for the dark side and blue for the light side—both infused with “kyber” sugar crystals inspired by lightsaber cores. The Oreos also feature heroes or villains embossed on the cookies themselves, with characters like Darth Vader, Darth Maul, and a stormtrooper representing the dark side, and Luke Skywalker, Yoda, and Princess Leia representing the light side. In total, there will be 20 iconic characters featured….
Greg Hildebrandt’s hand-painted pack art features 14 individual one-of-a-kind characters by the iconic Star Wars™ poster artist.
In late 2022, a NASA flight around the moon carried a variety of tree seeds. After their time in space, they returned to Earth. And now, the hope is that they will become moon trees. Troy, Ala., is one of the first places to get one. Here’s Troy Public Radio’s Joey Hudson….
MCCARTHY: There was a very significant preparation process to make sure they were completely dry and that there would be no moisture or potential. They tried to protect the seeds as much as possible from any impacts related to heat.
HUDSON: The mission was a success. After about four weeks, the seeds returned to Earth and were tested for radiation levels and genetic variants. And then the seeds became seedlings to be planted in communities around the country, like here at Troy University….
One The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player suffered what seemed like the ultimate tragedy in losing a 250-hour, 82% complete save file. But it turns out there’s a fate even worse: getting that save file back.
Back on April 23, Brian ‘Brian_F’ Foster, a competitive fighting game player and commentator, revealed that he had beaten Tears of the Kingdom after 250 hours, having gotten all Shrines, all light roots, all Armor sets, all Sage’s Wills, and all Yiga schematics. But with six sidequests missing and the map only 77% completed, Brian_F decided to keep going for a 100% completion run.Tears of the Kingdom is an amazing, expansive game that’s an absolute joy to explore – up until the very moment you decide you want to 100% complete it. We’re talking about a feat that initially took speedrunners 139 hours – that’s over five days straight – to complete, and while Speedrun.com shows those runs are now down to ‘just’ one or two days, that’s still a good metric for you to judge just how arduous and menial going for full completion here can be….
I’m familiar with Mark Jonathan Davis from his great Star Wars parodies, including “The Phantom Medley, Bob Hope At The Mos Eisley” comedy routine (also a Johnny Carson one), and more.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, David Goldfarb, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
The history of science is filled with beautiful hypotheses slain by ugly facts. The tendency of the universe to disregard the professional needs of hard-working scientists is something about which little can be done1. In fact, disproof is a vital and necessary element for scientific progress, no matter how vexing it must have been to Thomas Gold2. However, in that interval between hypothesis and disproof, a sufficiently enticing model can inspire intriguing science fiction stories.
Here’s one of his exhibits:
Quicksand Moon Dust
Prior to space probes landing on the Moon, the precise nature of the lunar surface was unknown. Among the contending models was Thomas Gold’s4 proposal that the lunar surface could be covered in a layer of fine dust. Depending on the properties and the depth, the layer might act like quicksand5. As it happens, the lunar surface is dusty, but visitors do not have to worry about sinking into it. That is the only good news. Lunar dust is actually much nastier than Gold envisioned. Abrasive lunar dust is a hazard to machines and humans alike.
Arthur C. Clark’s A Fall of Moondust(1961) embraced the most extreme case of Gold’s model. Deep dry dust seas are traversed by lunar boats conveying tourists. A mishap strands a boat deep beneath the lunar surface. Will rescuers locate and retrieve the tourists in time, or will they smother or be boiled in their own body heat6?
(2a) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present John Wiswell and Anya Johanna DeNiro on Wednesday, May 8, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003; Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
JOHN WISWELL
John Wiswell’s novel Someone You Can Build A Nest In was published by DAW Books in April and received starred reviews in Library Journal and BookPage, and was named one of the Best of the Best in SFF for 2024 by Ingram. His short fiction has won the Nebula Award and Locus Award, and been a finalist for the Hugo, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His fiction has been translated into ten languages. He teaches for Clarion West and for the Rambo Academy. More about him can be found at https://linktr.ee/johnwiswell.
ANYA JOHANNA DENIRO
Anya Johanna DeNiro is the author of the short novel OKPsyche from Small Beer Press and City of a Thousand Feelings from Aqueduct Press, which was on the Honor Roll for the Otherwise Award. She has also been a finalist for the Sturgeon Award and the Crawford Award, and shortlisted for the O. Henry Award. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Historian Richard Hornsey writes that Penguin publisher Allen Lane had an avowedly “leftist vision of social-democratic progress.” Lane aimed for a democratizing public sphere with an “engaged public readership,” though one perhaps not as left-left as the contemporary Left Book Club (1936–1948). What Lane used to reach these ends was pure capitalism: “the techniques of mass production, distribution, and retail.”
And an adorable black-and-white flightless bird.
“Choosing a brand character, and specifically a penguin, allowed [Lane] to appropriate the utopian dynamic of mass consumption and mold it to fit his own progressive cultural project,” writes Hornsey….
…“There’s a big generational divide about how you consume media,” [filmmaker Joe Russo] continued. “There’s a generation that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it’s aging out. Meanwhile the new generation are ‘I want it now, I want to process it now’, then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time. You know, it’s a very different moment in time than it’s ever been. And so I think everyone, including Marvel, is experiencing the same thing, this transition. And I think that really is probably what’s at play more than anything else.”…
…Counting Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which premieres next month, there are 10total films set in the varying canons of Planet of the Apes.
Things kicked off with the original Planet of the Apes movie back in 1968; that film would go on to spawn four sequels, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)…
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born April 29, 1908 — Jack Williamson. (Died 2006.)
By Paul Weimer: Jack Williamson. What does one say about an author who had been published continuously from the 1920’s up to the 2000s? Resilience. Staying power? An inexhaustible imagination?
All of these, and more, I say.
Jack Williamson
I first came across Williamson in the large collection of works that my elder brother, whom I think I’ve mentioned before got me into science fiction in the first place, had. That was The Humanoids, which includes his novelette “With Folded Hands”, a dystopia of unthinking robots and servitors gaining sentience, and basically (although expressed as “the Prime Directive”) following Isaac Asimov’s Law of Robotics and moving to take over the world, in an effort to protect humanity. It’s definitely a horror dystopic takeover of the world, as humans who resist the Mechanicals are taken away and lobotomized to prevent them disrupting the new society. And it’s an unhappy ending, as Underhill, our main character, and Sledge, the original creator of the Mechanicals, ultimately fail in stopping the takeover.
I’d read 1984 and Brave New World at this point, but to have a straight up science fiction story defy what was to me the cardinal trope of “the good guys must WIN” made an impression on me. Over the next decades, I encountered Williamson’s work time and again, since his prolific output meant that his works kept showing up in back corners of libraries, a story here and there in a collection, and the original book I read always simmered in my mind. This was an author with power and verve and not afraid to take chances.
Stonehenge Gate, his last novel, naturally, I had to read, and it was much of the “old time religion” of Williamson’s work that did feel something of a throwback to earlier models and eras of science fiction, but it charmed me all the same. And how could I resist a novel with a premise of a few friends basically finding a Stargate in the middle of the Sahara (the titular Stonehenge Gate) and going through to find out what was on the other side? The novel winds up pulling in elements of revolution, the origin of life on Earth and in general a cracking adventure running across multiple worlds and encountering some very strange alien species. It’s a fine capstone to an extensive and abiding body of work.
But it is The Legion of Time that really sticks out for me, even more than The Legion of Space (Space adventure), or Darker Than You Think (lycanthropes!) or his return to exploring dystopias in the Starchild books. The Legion of Time, which consists of a pair of stories, is the codifying pieces of science fiction for the idea of a Time War. Poul Anderson, the “Temporal Cold War” of Star Trek, The Big Time, Travelers, and Loki all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Williamson and coming up with the idea of multiple futures and factions in the future trying to influence the past to make their version of the timeline be the official and real one. There is also a Larry Niven Svetz story where he runs into someone trying to change the timeline from Svetz’s crapsack future (which he inadvertently created) back to the future that he is from, the nuclear war hellscape better than Svetz’s world.
The Legion of Time itself centers on a single choice, a “Jonbar Hinge”, where events are manipulated to make one young boy’s choice to either lead the world into a world of superscience and technology and freedom, or into a dread and horrible dystopia (once again, Williamson with the dystopias) where force and brutality are backed up by darker versions of the superscience of the original world. We also get a love story of sorts, as our hero Lanning feels both for Lethonee, the ruler of the utopia superscience state, and also feels attraction for the femme fatale Sorainya. And yet, even so, even as Sorianya is clearly the “Villainess”, Lethonee in her own way is as determined and forthright to make her version of the future come about as her darker duplicate. But the choice of worlds, and which of these two futures is the better for humanity, is always clear. Williamson makes no bones about being clear eyed about the dangers of dystopias and how one must risk much in order to keep them from coming about. One might not always succeed (see The Humanoids) but one must always try.
Long live his work!
(6) COMICS SECTION.
Bizarro features a fantasy medical breakthrough, or is it breakdown?
Eek! lets us witness an awkward dinner conversation.
Nominated rooms include games like 60 Seconds to Escape in Gurnee, Illinois, involving skeletons popping out at people down hallways, or Madness Toledo in Spain, featuring biohazard spills, unleashed monsters, and a huge Alien-esque creature taking up most of a room, ready to mow participants down with its toothy jaws. Diego Esteban, the owner of Madness, describes the competition as “the Oscars of escape rooms.”…
… [There] is a surprising amount of science that goes into creating them. A methodology called Escape Room Theory dictates how escape rooms are designed and built. The theory consists of a series of “rules” designers are encouraged to follow—like ensuring each item is used only once (or there’s only one answer to a specific puzzle), making individual puzzles solvable in five minutes or less, and allowing for non-linear puzzles, meaning that one item in a room doesn’t necessarily solve the puzzle you work on in another room. The goal is ultimately to not frustrate participants or lead them down a road that’s tedious or unsolvable….
This awe-inspiring and utterly beautiful novel told in verse will make you think, feel, and wonder why there aren’t more contemporary authors writing sci-fi that is both full of ideas and jaw-droppingly well written….
Time to set sail for adventure! Yeah, people we’ve got a map in the front of the book, we’ve got a retired legendary pirate captain pulled out of retirement for just one last job, we’ve got a crew of talented misfits and we have a truly evil magician after a magical relic. Djinn, monsters, magic, all we need is some Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monsters and a great time is guaranteed….
(10) COLONIZING BINARY SYSTEMS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Life around a binary system is fairly common and SF sub-trope, the classic example being the two suns setting in Star Wars.
This weekend, futurologist Isaac Arthur looked at the possibility of colonizing such worlds…
There are billions of binary star systems in our galaxy, including many of those stars closest to us. Can such systems host life, and what would it be like to live under two suns?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lis Carey.]
…In the upcoming relaunched Doctor Who Season 1 (2024), the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) will travel to the 1960s in the forthcoming episode “The Devil’s Chord,” and, at some point, cross paths with the Beatles….
… As Russell T. Davies says in the new Empire interview: “‘How would you do a Beatles episode without Beatles music?” Previous movies about the Beatles have faced similar problems. The 1994 biopic Backbeat — which chronicles the Beatles’ early days in Hamburg — features no actual Beatles music. Meanwhile, the 1979 movieBirth of the Beatles (helmed by Return of the Jedi director Richard Marquand!) used cover versions of most Beatles songs to avoid copyright issues of the time.
But, for Davies and Doctor Who, the copyright law problem became “the entire plot.” As Davies says, “I knew instantly you can never play Beatles songs on screen because the copyright is too expensive… That’s where the idea came from — copyright law!”
Could this mean the Doctor and Ruby will inspire alternate Beatles songs? Could the Beatles be getting by with a little help from their time-traveler friends? We don’t know the exact plot of “The Devil’s Chord,” but there’s a good bet that the Doctor will almost certainly inspire a classic Beatles song. We’ll just have to read between the lines to figure out which one.
(2) CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FINALISTS. The Carol Shields Prize shortlist has been revealed. The award recognizes “creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States”.
One of the finalists is a work of genre interest.
Birnam Woodby Eleanor Catton
In this eco-thriller, a guerilla gardening collective named ‘Birnam Wood’ (after Macbeth) meets an American billionaire. In his review for WHYY’s Fresh Air, John Powers writes, “this New Zealand-set book is a witty literary thriller about the collision between eco-idealism and staggering wealth.”
The other shortlisted books are:
Daughter by Claudia Dey
Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote
A History of Burning by Janika Oza
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan
The winner gets $150,000 and a residency with Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, Canada. Each of the four runner-ups will get $12,500. The prize-winner will be announced May 13.
(3) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST. Based on the descriptions of the works at the website, there are no books of genre interest among the 6 that made the International Booker Prize 2024 shortlist today.
(4) 2023’S MOST-CHALLENGED BOOKS. From the American Library Association: “ALA Releases Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023”. Publishers Weekly has the list. Based on the descriptions, none are sff works.
The Most Challenged Books of 2023
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, for LGBTQIA+, and sexually explicit content.
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, for LGBTQIA+ and sexually explicit content.
This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson, for LGBTQIA+ and sexually explicit content.
…I’ve been especially interested in revisiting three of her strangest works—her vampire novel Fledging; “Bloodchild,”a short story about a colony of humans living alongside an insectoid race of aliens; and the Xenogenesis trilogy, which explores human’s post-apocalypse relationship with a bioengineering race of extraterrestrials called the Oankali. Across these stories, I see a recurring fascination with the reality of our bodies, our needs and frailties, and the way our bodily desires inextricably link us to each other.
In each of these stories, humans are less powerful than their nonhuman counterparts, whether that’s the tentacled, pheromone-exuding Oankali in Xenogenesis or the three-meter long, centipede-like Tlic in “Bloodchild.” But for all of their physical superiority, the nonhuman characters are desperately reliant on their relationships with humans. In Xenogenesis, the Oankali can exude chemicals that drug humans with a thought and heal with a touch. They manipulate their own genetic makeup and easily heal their own bullet wounds. Yet they depend on their human relationships in order to live. Oankali adolescents go into metamorphosis where they are comatose—profoundly helpless—and rely on their human partners to care for them. In Imago, the final book in the trilogy, a young Oankali begins to physically dissolve, unable to survive because it does not have human companions to ground it in a stable form. As the narrator notes, “We called our need for contact with others and our need for mates hunger. One who could hunger could starve.”….
AfroAnimation, the largest annual event featuring diverse and BIPOC animators and creators, announced today the honorees for the first AfroAnimation Summit Icon Awards…
…Icon Award honoree Kemp Powers, director of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, will headline the summit’s kick-off panel April 10, ‘Developing Original Stories and the Art of Diverse Storytelling.’ Pioneer Award honoree Camille Eden, Vice President of Recruitment, Talent Development & Outreach at Nickelodeon, will speak on the April 11 panel, ‘Unveiling the Untold Narratives of Women in Entertainment: Triumphs, Challenges, & Journeys.’
In addition, Bruce Smith, creator and executive producer of Disney+’s The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, and Jermaine Turner, Director of Adult Genre Animation for Netflix, will be honored as industry pioneers at the AfroAnimation Icon Awards….
FRWD AwardsSemifinalists.(Celebrates the art of diverse storytelling in the film, new media, and streaming platform industries.)
Best Series:Castevania, The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, Young Love, Scavengers Reign
Best Animation Feature: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Elemental, The Boy and the Heron, Craig Before the Creek
Best International Series: Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, Iwájú, Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes, Supa Team 4
Best Animation Director: Kemp Powers (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse)
(7) M. JOHN HARRISON MEMOIR. Saga Press will publish author M. John Harrison’s anti-memoir Wish I Was Here on September 3, 2024.
What is an “anti-memoir”? M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical and literary realism. Yet in WISH I WAS HERE, he asks, ‘Is there even an M. John Harrison and if so, where do we find him?’ This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notebooking: ‘A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.’
Are these notebooks records of failed presence? How do they shine a light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of a young artist in counterculture London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author?
With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate and delight. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 9, 1937 — Marty Krofft. (Died 2023.)
H.R.Pufnstuf. Who’s your friend when things get rough? H.R. Pufnstuf. Can’t do a little, ‘cause he can’t do enough
Who here didn’t grow up watching some of the shows created by the Krofft brothers? Well, this is the day that Marty Krofft was born, so I get to talk about their work. So let’s get started.
Their very first work was designing the puppets and sets for Banana Splits, a rock band composed of four animal characters for Hanna-Barbera. To get a look at them, here’s the open and closing theme from the show.
After working for Hanna-Barbera, they went independent with the beloved H. R. Pufnstuf, their first live-action, life sized puppet series. It ran a lot shorter than I thought lasting only from September to December of ‘69. Like everything of theirs, it ended up in heavy, endless syndication.
Next was The Bugaloos. This was a musical group, very much in keeping with the tone with Banana Splits. It was four British teenagers wearing insect outfits, constantly beset by the evil machinations of the Benita Bizarre. Here’s the opening song, “Gna Gna Gna Gna Gna” courtesy of Krofft Pictures.
Lidsville, their next show lasted but seventeen episodes, and I’ve no idea if the short longevity of their series, all of them, was planned or due to poor ratings. This show had two types of characters: conventional actors in makeup taped alongside performers in full mascot costumes. It was mostly stop motion in its filming.
Opening credits are here. The opening was produced at Six Flags Over Texas. The show was itself shot at Paramount Pictures film studio in Los Angeles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFMuNkseruo
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters lasted two seasons though it was aired over three years, the second delayed because a fire at the beginning of season two which destroyed everything. It’s about two brothers who discover a friendly young sea monster named Sigmund who refuses to frighten people. Poor Sigmund. This time you get a full episode as that is all Krofft Pictures had up, “Frankenstein Drops In”.
There’s two more series I want to note.
The first is Land of the Lost which was created though uncredited in the series by David Gerrold. So anyone know why that was? It was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft who co-developed the series with Allan Foshko. Lots of genre tropes here. A family lost in a land with dinosaurs and reptile men? It was popular enough that it lasted three seasons. And here’s the opening and closing credits for season three.
The very last pick by me is Electra Woman and Dyna Girlwhich lasted but sixteen episodes of twelve minutes. Despite the ElectraEnemies, their foes here being way over the top, this is SF though admittedly on the pulp end of things.
So they stayed active including doing rebooted versions of new versions of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, H.R. Pufnstuf, Land of the Lost and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
Marty Krofft passed on from kidney failure on November 25, 2023, at the age of eighty six.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Wallace the Brave demonstrates that not everyone appreciates interesting facts.
(10) VASTER THAN EMPIRES, AND MORE EXPENSIVE. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis might be sff – which might matter more if the film can make it into theaters. Variety says it will premiere at Cannes. However, The Hollywood Reporter learned studios are not lining up to accept the film’s high-dollar marketing risk: “’Megalopolis’: Francis Ford Coppola’s Challenges in Distribution”.
…The project, which Coppola first began writing in 1983, cost a reported $120 million to make — funded in part by the sale of a significant portion of his wine empire (the 2021 deal was reportedly worth over $500 million). Clocking in at two hours and 15 minutes, the film follows the rebuilding of a metropolis after its accidental destruction, with two competing visions — one from an idealist architect (Adam Driver), the other from its pragmatist mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) — clashing in the process. References to ancient Rome — including Caesar haircuts on the men — abound…
… One source tells THR that Coppola assumed he would make a deal very quickly, and that a studio would happily commit to a massive P&A (prints and advertising, including all marketing) spend in the vicinity of $40 million domestically, and $80 million to $100 million globally.
That kind of big-stakes rollout would make Megalopolis a better fit for a studio-backed specialty label like the Disney-owned Searchlight or the Universal-owned Focus. But Universal and Focus have already tapped out of the bidding, sources tell THR….
… Why should some teenager enjoy perfect skin, a pain-free back, and functional joints when persons of my age could make much better use of these body parts? Yet such are the politically correct times in which we live that simply proposing, never mind implementing, mandatory organ1 donations is considered somehow controversial.
Science fiction can see past the squeamishness of short-term social fashions to the glorious world we might have if we were willing to apply technology in a socially responsible—which is to say, one that benefits the people in charge—manner. Consider these five classic tales….
One of the selections is –
The Reefs of Space by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson (1964)
…Reefs features an intriguing deep space ecology in no way inhibited by plausible science. The use of political prisoners as involuntary organ donors is much more plausible….
(12) SPACE COWBOYS READINGS. Space Cowboy Books will host an online Flash Science Fiction Night on April 23 with Howard V. Hendrix, Ai Jiang, and Hailey Piper. These short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) are great way to learn about new authors from around the world. Starts at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Lasts around half an hour. Register for free at Eventbrite.
If you’re looking for meteorites, here’s a tip: Go south. All the way south. And do it soon.
In some parts of Antarctica, there’s a good chance that what looks like a regular old rock could actually be a chunk of an asteroid, the moon, or even Mars. Roughly 60 percent of all known meteorites have been collected there.
But scientific sleuthing for such extraterrestrial material, which can shed light on how the solar system formed billions of years ago, will probably get more difficult in Antarctica in the coming decades. That’s because, as temperatures rise, thousands of meteorites will sink into the continent’s ice and disappear from sight every year, according to a new study published on Monday.
Antarctica’s meteorite largess isn’t because more extraterrestrial stuff is falling there, Cari Corrigan, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution and a curator of the National Museum of Natural History’s meteorite collection, said.
Rather, meteorites simply tend to be more visible on the Antarctic ice sheet than they would be, say, in your backyard. “Your eye can pick out a dark rock on a white surface super easily,” said Dr. Corrigan, who was not involved in the new research….
(14) ON THE JOB. Here’s the trailer for “Monsters at Work: Season 2” with Ben Feldman, Billy Crystal, and John Goodman. The season premiered April 5 on Disney Channel, and on May 5 comes to Disney+.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] For the small Venn overlap who know both references: “Leslie Nielsen in Star Wars”.
[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Kathy Sullivan, Dann, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
RITA BULLWINKEL: Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl are two of my favorite books I’ve ever read. And Dead in Long Beach, California, I just gobbled it whole in one sitting. I really feel like it is a book of science fiction. How do you feel about that genre camp?
BLACKBURN: I don’t think about genre like that, so I don’t approach any kind of work with one tone or angle as the goal. I have to have the voice that matters to me. But for this one, I did have this intention of doing this sort of high fantasy sci-fi, speculative kind of world that was tethered to our current modern world in a way. And as I kept going, I figured out, “Oh, the thing that’s nagging me, the thing that’s most hard to write is actually the part that’s closer to reality, and that’s the part I need to start investing more of my energy in.” That was a turning point during the early drafting stages, where I had to readjust the proportions and the vision and the scope. But I always knew it was going to be a little bit out of this world. Of course, the original title was “Lesbian Assassins at the End of the World,” so I was definitely going to reach far beyond what we know in this tangible universe. So that was fun to write, especially during the pandemic, when I was very disconnected from humanity. I wanted to be someplace safer, someplace where I understood everything, where I knew what was going to happen. So I started to get invested in that process and, apparently, that is a pretty cross-genre kind of way of looking at a story.
(2) LIVE FROM 1965. James Davis Nicoll fed the Young People Read Old SFFpanel James Schmitz’ “Balanced Ecology” from a 1965 issue of Analog, and one of the nominees for the first Nebula Awards (1966). What did they think? Well, they didn’t hate it.
Winners (tie): Dragana Matovic of Serbia for the story “Outside the Rain Was Relentlessly Falling” and Dr. Jennifer Grimes of Milford, MA for the story “The Simulation: Subject Ashe Klinn”.
Runner-up: Michael Barron of Parkville, MD for the story “The Last Time My Twin Destroyed the World”.
Honorable Mention: Jessica Li of Fremont, CA for the story “Wed the Sea Angels”.
Honorable Mention: Tyler Robinson of Dexter, MO for the story “Acid Memory Reflux”.
It turns out my unlimited hosting account was not as unlimited as I’d thought. In particular, it’s “not intended to be used for data backup or archiving purposes.” And 20-plus years and a quarter-terabyte of photos is clearly an archive of my own.
So I’m learning how I can rebuild the Gallery within my hosting service’s rules. It’s going to be a process, but we’ll get there.
The Jimmy Kimmel Live! host dropped a five-minute short on Monday night, directed by JKL‘s Will Burke, hyping his March 10 gig emceeing the Academy Awards — re-creating many Barbie sets and reuniting four of its castmembers in a spoof that finds a hapless Kimmel trying to make his way to the Dolby Theatre. “Since the dawn of time, men have been getting lost,” says a voice-of-God Helen Mirren, spoofing her own narration of the Margot Robbie feature. “This is the story of one such dum-dum.”…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS15h2qeTms
(6) THE MARVELS MINI-REVIEW. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The Marvels is now on Disney+ (as in, available to subscribers – we just watched it), and, I see, also on DVD/BluRay in libraries (having just checked my local library/network).
I liked this a lot. It was (IMHO) a fun, well-done ride throughout, with some unexpected scenes and bits.
Some brief possibly-helpful non-spoiler notes:
If you haven’t already watched the Ms. Marvel series (via Disney), it would help, I’m sure, so you know who (within the Marvel video universe) Ms Marvel is (there’s some powers differences vs the comics). And it’s a good show, well worth watching.
Captain Monica Rambeau’s story starts in WandaVision. I’m not sure watching WV for this is essential (they do one-line-summarize, which feels sufficient vis-a-vis the movie). IFTM (It Feels To Me)(and it’s implied/flashbacked) that some other of Rambeau’s character/backstory takes place in the Captain Marvel movie.
(One wonders what this movie might have been like if Rachel Brosnahan had been given that Cap M. role instead of Brie Larsen, yielding The Mazel-ous Ms Marvel 🙂 )
New York’s $700 million-a-year tax break for film and TV productions isn’t providing taxpayers with a good return on investment, according to a new analysis commissioned by the state itself….
…The state’s biggest industry-specific tax break belongs to the film industry, which gets $700 million a year to film or do post-production work in the Empire State. Hochul and legislative leaders are big supporters of the program, which has helped lure hundreds of productions over the years.
The tax break can be considerable. It covers up to 30% of a film’s qualified production costs, with another 10% available if productions are filmed in certain counties north of New York City. The credit is also refundable, meaning the state pays out the excess money if it exceeds a film production’s tax bill.
Last year, TV shows “Saturday Night Live,” “Blue Bloods,” “New Amsterdam” and “God Friended Me” all claimed the tax credit, totaling more than $20 million each, according to state records.
Beyond the lackluster return on investment, PFM’s report surmised that much of the filming that occurred in New York would have happened regardless of the tax credit….
(8) MEDICAL UPDATE. Nancy Collins shared news with followers of her GoFundMe about her recovery from a blood clot in one of her lungs: “What Doesn’t Kill Me Leaves Me With Medical Bills”. Donors have given $6,708 of the $10,000 goal as of today.
February 7th, 2024 by Nancy Collins, Organizer
I had to adjust my goal upward because I just found out how much my Eliquis prescription is costing me even *with* insurance. Holy cow. As it is, I’m having trouble getting it filled. The doctor sent my prescription to the Walgreens I use Monday evening. It’s Wednesday morning and it’s still not in stock. Apparently the “Starter Pack” isn’t kept in stock at any of the Walgreens–or most pharmacies, for that matter. My PCP is trying to get me samples to tide me over. Luckily, I feel okay and have enough energy to go buy compression socks.
I am deeply touched by the response so far. Y’all are good peoples.
Today by Nancy Collins, Organizer
I saw my PCP today, and she said my lungs sound good and warned me from taking NSAIDS until I’m off the blood thinners. She also set up an outpatient appointment with a Cancer Care Center for next month, to check that my clotting issues have been resolved. Also, this is the last day I take 4 Eliquis–tomorrow I step down to 2 a day for the next 3 weeks. And it’s also Mardi Gras! Laissez les Bon Temps Roulez to all of you who have helped by donating or passing along the link!
He’s been attending science fiction conventions for half a century.
The first con he worked was IguanaCon II, the 1978 Worldcon, here in Phoenix.
He chaired HexaCon 16 and CopperCon 28 and has worked most committee positions at a host of others, especially LepreCons and CopperCons, but also multiple Westercons, World Horror, World Fantasy, Anizona, MythosCon and RandomCon. Most recently he sponsored filk GoHs at CoKoCon.
Gary loved to read poetry on panels at various conventions. He was also a gaming fan and could be found at most of the local gaming conventions.
He was the editor’s assistant for years on ConNotations.
He’s served on the boards of LepreCon, Inc., CASFS and WesternSFA and still held positions on all three when he passed.
He was honoured at LepreCon 42, who made him their Fan GoH.
Perhaps most of all, he’s known for his association with filk, especially through the Phoenix Filk Circle, which he ran for many years.
Bruce D. Arthurs adds, “Hilde and I have known Gary for years, and always tried to catch up with each other at local conventions. One more face that will be missed.”
Born February 13, 1929 — Carol Serling, (Died 2020.) I try here to write Birthdays that I’ve not done before which is how I come to be celebrating Carol Serling, wife of Rod Serling.
She was, as all her family and friends will tell you, the faithful defender and steward of his work. She was born Carolyn Louise Kramer and she married him in 1948; they were married just twenty-seven years until his heart simply didn’t survive open heart surgery at age fifty.
Upon his death, she became rather active in preserving his legacy. She would become editor and television producer for many of The Twilight Zone-related enterprises including the third iteration of TheTwilight Zone series in which she was an executive producer for the first twenty episodes.
She has but one acting credit, in Twilight Zone: The Movie’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment, as a passenger. She was a key consultant for this film.
She was the executive producer on Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics, a two-story film. Ms. Serling found these two unproduced stories by her husband in a trunk at her home.
She donated many of his television scripts and movie screenplays to Ithaca College where her husband had taught courses in creative writing and film and television criticism. The gifts helped the college establish its Rod Serling Archives.
Now we come to her print publications.
She edited five Twilight Zone anthologies (Journeys to the Twilight Zone, Return to the Twilight Zone, Adventures in the Twilight Zone, Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary and More Stories from the Twilight Zone), plus the Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Reader with Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.
With David Brode, she wrote Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone: The 50th Anniversary Tribute.
I know that she was responsible for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine by licensing the name to Montcalm Publishing. She would be the associate publisher and consulting editor there.
Carol told her daughters that she would like this poem to be read at the time of her death…
Mary Elizabeth Frye’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep”
Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am in a thousand winds that blow, I am the softly falling snow. I am the gentle showers of rain, I am the fields of ripening grain. I am in the morning hush, I am in the graceful rush Of beautiful birds in circling flight, I am the starshine of the night. I am in the flowers that bloom, I am in a quiet room. I am in the birds that sing, I am in each lovely thing. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there. I do not die.
John Cleese is making it clear that he – and a few other Pythons – are in complete disagreement with long-ago co-star Eric Idle, who last weekend slammed manager (and daughter of Python co-founder Terry Gilliam) Holly Gilliam for what Idle suggested were the troupe’s dwindling finances.
“We own everything we ever made in Python and I never dreamed that at this age the income streams would tail off so disastrously,” Idle posted on X/Twitter Saturday. “But I guess if you put a Gilliam child in as your manager you should not be so surprised. One Gilliam is bad enough. Two can take out any company.”
Cleese left no doubt where he stands on the matter.
“I have worked with Holly for the last ten years,” the Fawlty Towers creator tweeted today, “and I find her very efficient, clear-minded, hard-working, and pleasant to have dealings with.”
Cleese continued, “Michael Palin has asked me to to make it clear that he shares this opinion. Terry Gilliam is also in agreement with this.”
Apparently there’s no love lost between Cleese and Idle, with the latter responding, when asked by an X follower if the two remain close, “I haven’t seen Cleese for seven years.” When another follower replied saying that made him sad, Idle responded, “Why. It makes me happy.”
Today, Cleese responded with an assessment so blunt some followers wondered if it was all a gag: “We always loathed and despised each other, but it’s only recently that the truth has begun to emerge.”
Some Amazon Prime customer were angry enough at Prime Video’s introduction of ads that decided to take legal action.
The retail giant is facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed on Friday that alleges it breached its terms of service and misled customers by introducing ads into Prime Video service and then requiring users to pay $2.99 to get rid of them. The Hollywood Reporter first spotted the lawsuit, and posted a copy of the lawsuit on its site.
Amazon turned on the ads to its Prime Video service after telegraphing the move a few months earlier. Executives said the ads would allow Amazon to continue investing in content without having to raise the price of the service. Unlike other subscription streaming services, Prime Video is a feature tied to the online retail company’s Prime service, so raising prices could’ve meant charging people who don’t even use the service a higher rate.
A couple of years back, British filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield learned that the 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh — which introduced the characters Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and Christopher Robin — was about to fall into the public domain and decided to direct a horror film featuring the quartet. The low-budget result, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, became a viral sensation after stills from the film hit the internet in May 2022.
At the time he was making the film, Frake-Waterfield was unable to feature the character of Tigger, who first appeared in 1928’s The House at Pooh Corner and had not yet bounced into the public domain. Pooh’s tiger buddy does, however, feature in the director’s sequel, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, as you can see in the frightening first-look images of the horror franchise’s version of Tigger.
In the film, Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Owl, and Tigger find their woodland home and their lives endangered after Christopher Robin reveals their existence. Not wanting to live in the shadows any longer, the group decides to take the fight to the town of Ashdown, leaving a bloody trail of death and mayhem in their wake….
From Australia comes a story too cool to believe. Like a vegetable version of Jurassic Park or King Kong, a copse of pine trees from a species that evolved in the Cretaceous Era were found high in the mountains.
These living fossils, to use the classic phrase, survived both the comet impact and subsequent global firestorm that killed the dinosaurs, as well as two intervening ice ages to make it to our time, and Australian botanists are treating the specimens as a top-secret national treasure.
The Wollemi pine evolved 91 million years ago and went extinct according to the fossil record 2 million years ago, but in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, a stand of 90 specimens were found high in the more remote peaks in 1994.
For the past three decades, and in extreme secrecy, a team of specialists from the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) of Australia has been gradually planting small clumps of the Wollemi pine in other locations to help ensure it has every chance to see another 91 million years.
It helps the story that the Wollemi doesn’t look much like any pine tree you’ve seen in the woods by your house. Sporting Granny Smith apple-green foliage that grows in a pattern similar to a fern, it has a covering of bark reminiscent of Coco-puffs….
Matthew Vaughn really made a name for himself with the ultra-stylized action movie Kingsman: The Secret Service in 2014. Now he’s bringing us Argylle, with an absolutely stacked cast of actors who are sometimes in it! Argyle definitely raises some questions. Like why was Henry Cavill presented as the star of this movie when he’s in it for just a few minutes? How many twists is too many twists? What does The Division even do? Why did they let her publicly share their secrets for half a decade? What’s that cat doing here?
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, Steven Lee, Rich Lynch, Bruce D. Arthurs, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MURDER. James Davis Nicoll assigned the “Young People Read Old SFF” panel a series of Hugo finalists to read. We’ve reached the end:
The final installment1 in Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists is Lois McMaster Bujold’s 1989The Mountains of Mourning. One of Bujold’s popular Miles Vorkosigan stories, Mountains is a murder mystery. Through Miles’ eyes, Bujold explores certain aspects of Barrayaran life generally kept off-stage thanks to the series’ focus on the aristocracy.
Mountains won the Best Novella Hugo, beating The Father of Stones by Lucius Shepard, A Touch of Lavender by Megan Lindholm, Time Out by Connie Willis, and Tiny Tango by Judith Moffett. I’ve not read the other finalists so I cannot compare them to the winner. I can say that Mountains was the first Bujold I read. It is the reason I have a shelf full of Bujold novels.
Fans liked it. I liked it. But did the Young People like it?…
Nicoll says the next project, debuting in 2024, is Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists.
I am happy to announce that this magazine, like its sister publication, Worlds of IF, is also being revived and relaunched by Starship Sloane Publishing Company, Inc.
This might be a slow process, as we are wonderfully busy with the booming relaunch of Worlds of IF already, and I have no desire to make things overly frenetic. The idea is to methodically breathe new life into Galaxy. It seems only fitting that these two magazines should walk hand in hand once again. I will be keeping this celebrated magazine skinny, minimalist in style, and highly selective. The quality of work will speak for itself….
… I do this for the love of creativity and science fiction. But I also strive for simplicity. If something becomes a self-imposed, burdensome form of work, I reevaluate. I will not place stressful expectations on myself here. A strict publishing schedule? Very unlikely. But semiannually sounds about right, I suppose….
It’s been repeated, echoed and understood ad nauseam that we live in the streaming era.
We get it. Something that streamers may not understand, however, is that nobody owns their digital media.
The $12.99 spent through Amazon Prime Video to purchase “Barbie” is not “your” copy of the film. A person only has access to it until Amazon decides it doesn’t want to support the licensing anymore. This concept is not new or nuanced, but it is lost. The constant shuffling of online media between major streaming conglomerates has resulted in physical media’s futility in the eyes of the general public. We indeed live in the streaming age, but it’s also an age where the cultural impact of art preservation is needed more than ever.
This sentiment is not a condemnation against people using services like Netflix and Spotify. The convenience factor of these platforms is undeniable. However, combing through records, DVDs and books at local businesses should become something other than ancient practice.
Art preservation is at the forefront of this streaming puzzle because of the cultural significance of owning physical media. Much like artifacts, art has been replaced, lost and not protected. Now, instead of encouraging ownership of your favorite titles, businesses that still champion the physical media medium are fighting an uphill battle.
With all the revenue that floods in through streaming platforms, physical media becomes a nuisance to the profit margins of online Fortune 500s.
So, when a seemingly neglected and inevitable problem like this presents itself, the starting point of where to spark the renaissance can get blurred. Viewers, listeners, patrons and readers should look to local shops that allow physical media literacy to return to the mainstream….
This is a brief post throwing my support behind the ongoing St. Martin’s Press reviewer boycott, which started in late October (as far as I’m aware; if anyone has more conclusive timeline information, please let me know). It is in response to a few major issues, like the general favoritism of white reviewers for ARCs over reviewers of color and, more recently, the behavior of a marketing employee in response to recent escalation in violence between Israel and Palestine, with said employee spewing Islamophobic and queerphobic rhetoric on their socials. All receipts and a more thorough recap of events can be found at the “Readers for Accountability” website here, along with a list of the boycott demands, screenshots, graphics, and all other relevant information.
But until those demands are met, in short addressing the actions of their employee and their action plan for the future, I am joining my fellow reviewers in withholding reviews and any other promo for St. Martin’s Press, and invite anyone else interested to join.
As Courtney’s post says, the allegations are documented at the “Readers for Accountability” website. Their overview of the complaints follows:
The boycott of St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books, and other related imprints is a direct response to the publishers lack of accountability regarding one of their employees. This employee, who we will not name here, posted Islamophobic, Queerphobic, and anti-Palestinian content on their personal social media. This content was shared in Instagram stories and was brought to our attention by Palestinian activist and BookToker @vivafalastinleen. Leen noted that while she is on the St. Martin’s Press influencer list, she never seemed to receive any of the ARCs she requested. Additionally, Leen noticed that her white counterparts would receive ARCs regularly. She began to question if this was a symptom of the employee’s bigotry when she was sent screenshots of a marketing Islamophobic employee sharing racist, Islamophobic pink washing content to their stories. Leen attempted to reach out to St. Martin’s Press when the employee’s posts came to light, but struggled to receive a response and was largely ignored. Other influencers and content creators reached out as well with similar results. However, Leen did eventually receive email from Brant Janeway. However, the response was dismissive and defensive with no action being taken to investigate.
The boycott was officially enacted after ten days of radio silence from St. Martin’s Press and Wednesday books. During those ten days, content creators were emailing, DMing, commenting, and making videos to demand that St. Martin’s Press make a statement to no avail. As such, Leen created a video that provided other creators with context for the boycott. This video also included a large amount of screenshots and context into why those screenshots are so dangerous. Twitter likes were also included so as to provide evidence of how deep the employee’s bigotry runs. Demands were issued for St. Martin’s Press and Wednesday Books in hopes and readers will continue to boycott the publishers and related imprints until those demands are met.
…I believe the reason my writing received poor evaluations lay primarily in my choice of genre. All of my stories took place in Japan, or had zainichi as the main characters. In North Korea these were dismissed as “foreign works”, the catch-all term for anything about the wider world. Like anywhere, in North Korean literary circles there is a fair amount of specialisation, and each writer has his or her own style and character.
The most highly regarded genre, it goes without saying, is No 1 literature – that is, works about members of the ruling Kim family. This is not a genre that just anybody can write. In order of esteem, the genres of North Korean literature are:
1) No 1 works: stories about the achievements and personalities of the Kim family.
2) Anti-Japan partisan works AKA revolutionary works: stories set within the colonial-era independence movement.
3) War works: stories set during the Korean war.
4) Historical works: stories set during the Yi, Koguryo or Koryo dynasties.
5) Real-life works: stories about ordinary society from the postwar to the present.
6) South Korean works: stories set in South Korea.
7) Foreign works: stories set anywhere outside Korea.
I was involved with foreign works. Aside from No 1 works, writers had free choice of any genre, and we were also free to move around and experiment between genres. But only the most elite, accomplished writers were permitted to produce No 1 works….
(6) STRANGER THAN FICTION (BUT NOT FOR LONG). [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] People have seen me complain that I didn’t sign up to live in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in now, and thought I was exaggerating.
Nope.
Brian Krebs is probably the premier computer security journalist in the US. As I understand it, he had a column in the Washington Post, until the Post’s editors got freaked out by the number of what the police, and perhaps the FBI, considered “credible death threats”. My favorite story is from one of his investigations, the FBI followed the target, then suckered him to travel from eastern Europe to Guam, where he was arrested, extradited, and spent several years in US jails.
I’ve actually got a short story based on him that I’ve been trying to sell, but I guess it’s not “character-driven” enough (that I sincerely hope never happens, although he and his family have been swatted several times).
“I Hope I Call You Back” by Tara Campbell – Music by Phog Masheeen – Read by Heather Morgan
“The Escape” by Jean-Paul L. Garnier – Music by Fall Precauxions – Read by the author
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born December 16, 1917 — Arthur C. Clarke. Sir Arthur C. Clarke is one of one of my of all time favorite writers, however, this will be not be an all-inclusive look at him, but what I like for his films and writings. So let’s me get started now…
As regards short works, Tales from the White Hart is without doubt the stories I like above all others. Like Niven’s Draco Tavern stories or those of Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers, I adore stories told in a bar setting, and these are quite splendid.
Those are hardly his only great short stories. NyCon II would give him Hugo Award for “The Star” story which is wonderful, “The Nine Billion Names of God” got a well-deserved Retro Hugo at Noreascon 4, and Loncon 3 likewise honored “How We Went to Mars”. And I loved “A Meeting with Medusa” as well.
Arthur C. Clarke receives Hugo Award from chairman Dave Kyle at the 1956 Worldcon, NyCon II.
Which collection you pick up is your choice — The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke currently being published legitimately in ebook format by Open Road Media has somewhere around ninety stories in it and is an excellent choice. It has “The Nine Billion Names of God” in it, another story of his I should note I love.
Novels? Well let’s start with The Fountains of Paradise if only because I got to actually got to see the setting in Sri Lanka that it’s based off of. Every bookshop there had copies of it. And it certainly deserved the Hugo it got at Noreascon Two.
I also have on my reading list the Hugo-nominated A Fall of Moondust, one of the better lunar colonization novels ever written; and likewise The Sands of Mars is a worthy look at using and that planet.
Now we come to Rendezvous with Rama which won a Hugo at DisCon II. Damn that’s a fascinating novel. I re-read maybe a decade back and I’m please to say that the Suck Fairy broke her toe trying to tarnish its reputation.
So films. Well it in my mind’s eye, there is but one film only and that is 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve seen it in cinema once, many times on a small screen. It’s wonderful. Yes, it got a Hugo at St. LouisCon.
That’s it for him. Have a good evening.
Alice Turner and Arthur C. Clarke. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter
There were a ton of amazing horror books published in 2023, and as a genre, horror delivered so much — from fresh takes on vampire stories to historical works that looked at racism and misogyny. That made selecting just 10 titles for this list a formidable task. So consider this a personal pantheon of favorites from 2023.
Some of the books on this list are easy reads and some will challenge you. Some are long and multilayered while others have a great sense of humor or unfurl at breakneck speed. Some adhere to a classic understanding of horror and others aim to redefine it. The important thing is that they are all outstanding.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is known for her ability to stylishly jump from genre to genre, and in SILVER NITRATE (Del Rey, 318 pp., $28),she goes full-blown horror. The book follows Montse, a sound editor navigating the macho culture of the film industry in Mexico City in the ’90s, and her best friend, Tristán, a soap opera star whose career is withering, as they help a horror director shoot a scene that’s really a ritual to break an awful curse. It’s a creepy, fast-paced tale filled with Nazis on the run and more. The novel is also Mexican to the core — it celebrates the country’s history, culture and films. This book pulls you in with its lovable, deeply flawed characters and gripping plot, and wows you with its eerie atmosphere and deft blend of historical fiction, horror and black magic….
(12) THE HOLE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal there is an interesting piece that may explain the dark matter conundrum. Could tiny, primordial black holes made during the Big Bang, hiding in stars account for the missing mass??? “Do tiny black holes from cosmic dawn hide within giant stars?”
“…Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? The idea is not so far-fetched “
This month, an enormous dark and cool spot, known as a coronal hole, opened up on the Sun’s surface—almost as if it were being swallowed by a black hole.
(13) CHRISTMAS SF BOOKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It’s that time of year again to remind folk seeking SF/F books for themselves or as Christmas presents for others that the SF2 Concatenation seasonal news page has forthcoming Science Fiction and forthcoming fantasy book listings from the major SF/F book imprints over here in Brit Cit. Back when last season’s news page was posted, these titles were all forthcoming but now, with the festive season fast approaching, most of these are now out. With just six shopping days to Christmas, there’s just time to order from your favourite genre bookshop. Happy Crimble…
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]
(1) APPRECIATING A FINE ANTIQUE. James Davis Nicoll has a new assignment for the Young People Read Old SFpanel.
This month’s Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists features Bruce Sterling’s 1988 “Our Neural Chernobyl”. Sterling was, of course, a grand figure in science fiction at the time, being nominated and winning too many awards to list here. The Hugo was merely one of those awards….
Bruce Sterling’s early works are “old sff” now, but wow, where did the time go….
(2) SENIOR BRITISH DIPLOMAT ON MUSK AND SF. The author of “Does Elon dream of electric sheep?” at Medium is Julian Braithwaite, former Director General for Europe at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and past Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UK Mission to the WTO, UN and Other International Organisations in Geneva.
One of the most interesting revelations from this week’s AI Safety summit in the UK was something I didn’t expect: the role science fiction plays in Elon Musk’s world.
Interesting to me at any rate, as a fan of the genre and what it says about each generation’s concerns and hopes for the future.
Musk is widely considered a voice of caution on AI, eloquently warning about the risks. The famous joint letter in March in which he and others called for a pause in the development of AI frontier models. His penchant for kill switches to shut down rogue AI.
So it was something of a surprise to find him sitting with Prime Minister Sunak on Wednesday, urging people to read Iain M Banks, the Scottish science fiction author, and his “Culture” novels.
Surprising for two reasons. First, because the AI depicted in these novels, the “Minds”, are incredibly powerful but benign partners for humanity, co-creators of a galaxy-spanning utopian civilisation based on individual freedom and superabundance. And second because, in the science fiction of AI, the benevolent Minds are very much an outlier….
(3) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]
How to access the online Chengdu Worldcon site from outside China
In Thursday’s Scroll, I wrote about how the con’s online site was no longer accessible outside China. However, the error message reported by the browser made me think that there might be a workaround, and with the kind assistance of parties who will remain nameless, I can document a process whereby other con members can also regain access.
There is one slight caveat: I’m a Linux user, and haven’t had to touch OS X for over a year, and Windows for several years, so I can only reliably provide instructions for Linux. I’m sure people who are more familiar with those other operating systems can provide addiitonal help in the comments. (As for iOS or Android, I have absolutely no idea if or how you might be able implement a similar workaround.) I’d also not be surprised if there is a more elegant solution to the problem than the one I’ve written up here; again, hopefully others can suggest things in the comments.
Basically, because DNS servers no longer have entries for online.worldcon.com to map it to an IP address, you have to add a manual override. On a Linux machine, you can edit /etc/hosts to add a line “121.29.37.164 online.chengduworldcon.com” (no quotes) as shown in the screenshot. You’ll need to do this via sudo, as that file should only be editable by the root user.
(Note that you can’t go directly to https://121.29.37.164/ in your browser; it just comes up with a “Forbidden” error.)
My recollection is that on current versions of OS X, you can do something pretty similar to the Linux /etc/hosts fix, but there’s perhaps some other faffing around you have to do to make sure the networking stack picks up your edits.
For the latest version of Windows that I was familiar with (10 I think?) the hosts file lived at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts – whether that’s still the case, I have no desire to research into. You would also need to edit this file with Administrator privileges.
A couple of things to note:
Whilst this manual override should be fairly benign, if the DNS record is restored and the site moves to a different IP address, then you wouldn’t be able to access the site, until you remove the override. (And it should go without saying, you should be very wary about taking advice from random people on the internet about changing your network settings, without having a reasonable understanding about what the change actually does.)
Even when you get into the site and the “Live Planet” area where the videos reside, you might not be able to play the “Grasping the Future” video. This is because the link to the underlying video file is a http:// URL, which by default are blocked when being accessed from https:// pages. (Filers may remember a pretty much identical problem affecting Voter Packet downloads on the Hugo site…)
Related to the “bitrot” comments on that Scroll, just in case something similar happens to the other Chengdu sites, here are their IP addresses:
Con report published on Chinese government science site
This is quite an interesting con report, in that whilst it was published on a Chinese government science website, it’s clear that the author, Cao Wenjun, is a fan. She covers areas that are of more interest to File 770 readers than the majority of the Chinese media coverage I’ve seen, which focusses more on the showbiz and business aspects of the event. There’s a long section about what happened with RiverFlow, which is the first time I’ve seen any professional media mention that.
Some extracts (via Google Translate, with minor manual edits):
An insider told me beforehand that late-night snacking is the essence of all science fiction activities. This time I personally participated in them, and suddenly realized that this statement was true.
After the formal activities every day, groups of people in the science fiction circle always gathered together for late-night snacks. Sometimes groups of people who were working separately met each other in the hotel lobby or halfway, and they would gather together to form a larger late-night snack team, as if the stars in the universe attracted each other and converged to form a galaxy. In the circle, everyone was very familiar with each other, and those who have known each other from beforehand will treat each other as brothers. Occasionally, when a new face appears, everyone will get closer to each other immediately. After all, as long as you love science fiction, you’re part of the family. I had a busy schedule during the day and didn’t have much time to look for delicious food, so I experienced almost all the Chengdu delicacies during this trip at these late night snacks. At the late-night snack scene, I was fortunate enough to meet science fiction writers and critics such as Baoshu, [File 770 contributor] San Feng, A Que, Huihu, Xie Yunning, Jiao Ce, Wang Nuonuo, Wu Shuang, Qiyue, and Yang Wanqing [note: I corrected a couple of names there, but I’m sure others will have been mangled by machine translation]…
This international science fiction convention has many foreign writers and science fiction practitioners participating, and we often met them whilst having late-night snacks. Many domestic science fiction writers are also translators of foreign works. Inspired by the spirit of science fiction, everyone communicates smoothly and happily.
Probably because writers are often used to writing at night, even if they attend meetings all day long and eat late-night snacks until midnight, no one seems tired. Everyone raised their glasses and talked freely, congratulating the nominees, congratulating the winners, and congratulating everyone around them, and their drinking levels increased along with the mood. People talked about reading and writing, about work and life, and about the land, and the vast starry sky above their heads. During the night, rain fell, and the shopkeepers put up their awnings. The lights shone on the awnings stained with water drops and on the wet ground. The whole street looked like a spiral arm of the Milky Way, studded with colourful stars. The writers sat around the long table, surrounded by warm mist, chatting, laughing and clinking glasses, creating a dreamlike Chengdu night that will never be forgotten…
[After the Hugo ceremony] when I arrived at the hotel after returning from the hospital, I saw several people getting off the shuttle bus from the venue. One of them was Hai Ya, who was holding a Hugo Award trophy. The SF people who were at the door of the hotel immediately expressed their congratulations to him, and Hai Ya did not hide his happiness. But I could see from his heavy breathing that he was still in a state of shock beyond belief.
Everyone was sitting around the tea table in the hotel lobby, and the Hugo Award trophy was placed on the tea table, allowing us to watch, touch and admire it. Hai Ya didn’t sit on the sofa, but sat cross-legged on the steps next to it. At that time, I didn’t know that he was wearing his work attire; I just thought that the clothes fit him well, but sitting on the steps like this was a bit strenuous. Someone asked him how he felt at this time. He took a long breath and said that he had imagined this moment when he learned that his story had been shortlisted, but that was just his imagination. It had really happened, and he felt incredible. Someone told him that his real name and workplace had been posted online. Hai Ya shrugged, appearing a little troubled and helpless. He said that when standing in the spotlight, people always have two sides. When you receive an honour, you will also lose something. He mentioned that he always writes after work, so his level of output is not high, but it was just as a kind of adjustment and relaxation. In subsequent news reports, many media asked this question, and he responded in the same way, but it seemed that many netizens did not understand.
What I learned is that most science fiction writers are actually like this. They have their own day jobs. Some are college teachers, some are engineers, some are journalists, and they are from all walks of life. Writing is just their side job…
When asked about how he planned to take such a big and heavy trophy back on the plane, because it might not be allowed on board, Hai Ya said, “Let’s leave it to my publisher. I have to rush back to work first.” Several writers smiled understandingly on the spot, saying that they had taken a day or two off from work before they could attend the meeting, and they had to go back to work on Monday.
In my opinion, Hai Ya is not very familiar to many people in science fiction circles. He seems to have always fully separated his work life and hobbies, and protected them well. In the end, everyone took turns taking photos with him, including me. It was the first time I had taken a photo with a science fiction writer since attending the conference, and it also fulfilled a long-held wish…
At the venue, I spent some time observing the children who came to the venue. Some of them came with their families, and some came with their schools wearing their uniforms. They looked at everything in the venue with curiosity and excitement, stopped in front of every picture in the science fiction exhibition, and flipped through science fiction novels that they might not fully understand at the book signing counter. When it was getting dark, I saw a mother holding her child and saying she wanted to go home. The child moved reluctantly and asked: “Mom, can you come tomorrow? It’s so much fun here!”
My son is five years old and is very interested in everything related to science. I brought him along this time to let him experience the atmosphere of the World Science Fiction Convention. Like other children, he ran around in the open space on the first floor of the hall, interacted with people cosplaying science fiction characters, watched robots playing drums, experienced science fiction games in the theme exhibition hall, and received souvenirs and ribbons from each booth, looked at paintings drawn by other children, and watching the robot dog for a long time, without ever wanting to leave. When I was listening to a panel where Korean science fiction writers such as Kim Cho-yeop talked about Korean science fiction works, he also slipped into the venue at some point, wearing a simultaneous translator, and listened quietly for a long time. I asked him what he thought of science fiction conventions, and he shouted, “It’s fun!” …
In my opinion, science fiction needs to open its doors and let everyone participate, make it fun for children, and let the public play like children. Perhaps we don’t have to worry that the current science fiction traffic is concentrated on Liu Cixin, because his science fiction works are also an open door. Just like many science fiction authors and science fiction fans in the past started to get into science fiction from “Little Know-it-All Roams the Future”, Liu Cixin’s works are now the beginning of many people’s enlightenment on the road of science fiction, and they are also the future of Chinese science fiction.
What makes me happy is that after five days of reporting daily experiences to my circle of friends, many of them who hadn’t paid much attention to science fiction, began to ask me to recommend some SF novels for introductory reading. Other friends were very interested in telling me about the science fiction novels they had recently read. I feel that I myself have become a small window of Chinese science fiction, opening up with enthusiasm, calling to and embracing everyone around me.
The author with the Kormo/Kemeng mascotRiverFlow and Ling Shizhen accepting the Best Fanzine Hugo for Zero GravityHai Ya’s Best Novelette HugoChildren with the Kormo mascot
Xiaohongshu image galleries
I suspect most of the items in this Xiaohongshu image gallery，have already been seen in previous Scrolls, but I don’t think I’ve seen too many of the stamps, which are based on some of the con reports, that were popular amongst kids.
Similarly this one has many familiar sights, but also photos of a wall of Post-Its (I think at the Three-Body Problem event) and some author handprints, neither of which I’d previously encountered.
And this post continues the theme, although there are more photos of the props and exhibits than I’ve usually seen. The accompanying note is a short report that’s also worth reading; here’s the nearly the entire text via Google Translate, with manual edits:
The science fiction conference was fruitful and I was very happy.
The World Science Fiction Convention was really fun. I really gained a lot from those days. I was lucky enough to get autographs from Liu, Sawyer and [German author Brandon Q.] Morris, and saw all kinds of interesting exhibitions… But when it comes to science fiction-related topics, I feel very happy. Especially when participating in the panels, I felt that the atmosphere was super good and everyone was very happy. After all, SF was a topic that everyone was very interested in but usually can’t find friends to discuss it with.
The volunteers working the con were are all very friendly students. Not only were they very interested in science fiction, but they were also very passionate. It makes people feel the vitality of young people in the science fiction convention, and also makes people feel the friendliness of the city of Chengdu.
The musical fountain at the weekend was also particularly good. It performed for half an hour after the Hugo Awards, and was really beautiful.
Although the entire conference did not feel perfect during the organization process, and the venue was indeed too far away. It still took two hours to get to the venue by bus and subway every day, but attending the con will remain an unforgettable memory
(4) CHENGDU CONREPORT BY NEXT YEAR’S GOH. Ken MacLeod, who will be a Glasgow 2024 Worldcon guest of honor, blogs about his experience at this year’s con in China: “Chengdu Worldcon: Meet the Future” at The Early Days of a Better Nation. The post includes many photos.
Last month I spent far too few days in China, at the Chengdu Worldcon, to which I was invited as an international guest. My travel, and accommodation for me and my wife, were covered by the Committee of the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention, for which much thanks.
We had a wonderful time. The convention was a smashing success and easily the biggest, and most publicly celebrated, Worldcon ever….
…I took part in a couple of panels, one on Science Fiction and Future Science and one on cyberpunk, and was interviewed on video by an Italian documentary company and on voice recording for the Huawei news website. For two mornings I put in an hour or two at the Glasgow Worldcon stand. Never in my life have I been asked for so many autographs, or to pose with so many people for photographs. Nicholas Whyte, also at the stall, had the same experience, and others did too. Hardly any of the people whose notebooks and souvenirs we signed, or who stood beside us to have their photo taken, could have known who we were: that were overseas visitors with something to do with science fiction was enough. Among the few who did know us were some students from the Fishing Fortress College of Science Fiction in Chongqing. Our enthusiastic reception was nothing to that of Cixin Liu, author of the Three-Body trilogy and the story filmed as The Wandering Earth. His signing queue was like those I’ve seen for Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Science fiction in China is taken very seriously and sincerely by its fans….
Warner Bros‘ anticipated Paul King-directed feature musical Wonkahas hit early tracking six weeks before its release on December 5, with box office analytics film The Quorum predicting a $20 million-$23 million opening. Note it’s still early in the campaign, so there’s potential for upside.
Unlike other tracking services that project three weeks before a movie’s release, Quorum is six weeks ahead.
In regards to Wonka‘s marketing campaign, there is material out there to move the needle: Two official trailers on the Warner Bros YouTube channel measuring at 31M and 9M views each, respectively; and lead star Timothée Chalamet will host Saturday Night Liveon November 11 with the actor also on the cover of GQ. In addition, Warners has 17 one-sheets out there for the movie (in billboards, in-theater and online), and if there’s any barometer as to how much a studio is committing to a movie, it’s in the quantity of one-sheet posters….
On Saturday, the library was hit by what it is calling a “cyber incident.” Ever since, its website has been down and scholars have been unable to access its online catalog. The library’s Wi-Fi has also stopped working, and staff members haven’t been allowed to turn on their computers.
In interviews this week, seven regular users of the library — including the author of a forthcoming book on classical music, a University of Cambridge lecturer, two postgraduate students and a Shakespearean scholar — said that the library had essentially gone back to a predigital age.
Now, according to a staff member in the library’s “rare books and music” reading room, ordering a book involves looking up its catalog number in one of several hundred hardback books or an external website, writing that number onto a slip of paper and then handing it to a librarian who, in turn, would check their records to see whether the book was available. Books are only available if they are stored at the main library location.
Any incident at the British Library tends to be high-profile news in Britain.
Yet the British Library has issued only brief comments about the episode on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. On Tuesday, it posted a statement saying that the library was “experiencing a major technology outage as a result of a cyber incident. This is affecting our website, online systems and services, and some on-site services including public Wi-Fi.”
On Friday, a library spokeswoman said in an email that she could not provide further comment. She did not respond to questions on whether an attack had actually occurred….
Michael Whelan has made a career painting aliens, dragons, robots and other fantastical creatures for books covers. While he finds A.I. tools useful for brainstorming, he is also concerned about its impact on younger illustrators….
The first time Michael Whelan was warned that robots were coming for his job was in the 1980s. He had just finished painting the cover for a mass-market paperback edition of Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger,” a gritty portrait of the title character with the outline of a tower glimpsed through the haze behind him.
The art director for the project told him to enjoy these cover-art gigs while he could, because soon they would all be done by computers. Whelan dismissed him at the time. “When you can get a good digital file or photograph of a dragon, let me know,” he recalled saying.
For the next three decades, Whelan kept painting covers the old way — on canvas, conjuring dragons, spaceships and, of course, robots for science fiction and fantasy giants including Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Brandon Sanderson.
Over time, Whelan forgot the art director’s name, but not his words. Now, he said, the day he was warned about is here. Robots have already started taking book illustration jobs from artists — and yes, they can paint dragons.
Over the past few months, users working with A.I. art generators have created hundreds of images in Whelan’s style that were slightly altered knockoffs of his work, he said, forcing him to devote considerable time and resources to getting the images removed from the web.
“As someone who’s been in this genre for a long time, it doesn’t threaten me like it does younger artists who are starting out, who I have a lot of concern for,” Whelan said. “I think it’s going to be really tough for them.”
While much of the discussion in publishing around generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has focused on A.I.’s unauthorized use of texts for training purposes, and its potential to one day replace human authors, most writers have yet to be directly financially affected by A.I. This is not true for the commercial artists who create their book covers….
(8) FEARS OF THE FIFTIES. You can view “Atomic Attack”, an adaptation of Judith Merril’s novel Shadow on the Hearth, originally aired on The Motorola Television Hour in 1954.
In this sobering film, a family living 50 miles outside of New York must escape the fallout from a nuclear bomb dropped upon the Big Apple.
Taraja Ramsess will always be remembered by those who knew him best as a loving brother, a devoted father and a hard-working stuntman.
The “Black Panther” stuntman was killed alongside two of his children in a car crash on Halloween night on an Atlanta highway, according to reporting by local affiliate WSB-TV.
The 41-year-old was making his way back home with his children around 11 p.m. when he crashed into a tractor-trailer that had broken down near an exit on the left-hand side of the highway….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 4, 1912 — Wendayne Ackerman. She was the translator-in-chief of 137 novels of the German space opera series Perry Rhodan, the majority published by Ace Books. She left Germany before WWII to escape anti-Semitism, working as a nurse in France and London. After the war she emigrated to Israel where she married her first husband and had a son. Following their divorce she moved to LA in 1948, and soon met and married Forrest J Ackerman. (Died 1990.)
Born November 4, 1917 — Babette Rosmond. She worked as an editor at the magazine publisher Street & Smith, editing Doc Savage and The Shadow in the late Forties. Rosmond’s first story, co-written by Leonard M. Lake, “Are You Run-Down, Tired-“ was published in in the October 1942 issue of Unknown Worlds. Error Hurled was her only genre novel and she only write three short genre pieces. (Died 1997.)
Born November 4, 1920 — Sydney Bounds. Writer, Editor, and Fan from Britain who was a prolific author of short fiction, and novels — not just science fiction, but also horror, Westerns, mysteries, and juvenile fiction. He was an early fan who joined Britain’s Science Fiction Association in 1937. He worked as an electrician on the Enigma machine during World War II, and while in the service, he started publishing the fanzine Cosmic Cuts. The film The Last Days on Mars (an adaptation of “The Animators”) and the Tales of the Darkside episode “The Circus” are based on stories by him. In 2005, two collections of his fiction were released under the title The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: Strange Portrait and Other Stories, and The Wayward Ship and other Stories. In 2007, the British Fantasy Society honored him by renaming their award for best new writer after him. (Died 2006.)
Born November 4, 1934 — Gregg Calkins. Writer, Editor, and Fan. Mike Glyer’s tribute to him reads: “Longtime fan Gregg Calkins died July 31, 2017 after suffering a fall. He was 82. Gregg got active in fandom in the Fifties and his fanzine Oopsla (1952-1961) is fondly remembered. He was living in the Bay Area and serving as the Official Editor of FAPA when I applied to join its waitlist in the Seventies. He was Fan GoH at the 1976 Westercon. Calkins later moved to Costa Rica. In contrast to most of his generation, he was highly active in social media, frequently posting on Facebook where it was his pleasure to carry the conservative side of debates. He is survived by his wife, Carol.” (Died 2017.)
Born November 4, 1953 — Kara Dalkey, 70. Writer of YA fiction and historical fantasy. She is a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship (which if memory serves me right includes both Emma Bull and Stephen Brust) and the Scribblies. Her works include The Sword of Sagamore, Steel Rose, Little Sister and The Nightingale. And her Water trilogy blends together Atlantean and Arthurian mythologies. She’s been nominated for the Mythopoeic and Otherwise Awards.
Born November 4, 1953 — Stephen Jones, 70. Editor, and that is putting quite mildly, as he went well over the century mark in edited anthologies edited quite some time ago. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror accounts for eighteen volumes by itself and The Mammoth Book of (Pick A Title) runs for at least another for another dozen. He also, no surprise, to me, has authored a number of horror reference works such as The Art of Horror Movies: An Illustrated History, Basil Copper: A Life in Books and H. P. Lovecraft in Britain. He’s also done hundreds of essays, con reports, obituaries and such showing up, well, just about everywhere. He’s won a number of World Fantasy Awards and far too many BFAs to count.
If an unexpected meow, peculiar pose, or unusual twitch of the whiskers leaves you puzzling over what your cat is trying to tell you, artificial intelligence may soon be able to translate.
Scientists are turning to new technology to unpick the meanings behind the vocal and physical cues of a host of animals.
“We could use AI to teach us a lot about what animals are trying to say to us,” said Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioural medicine at the University of Lincoln.
Previous work, including by Mills, has shown that cats produce a variety of facial expressions when interacting with humans, and this week researchers revealed felines have a range of 276 facial expressions when interacting with other cats.
(13) IMPACT FACTOR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story is “Impact Factor”.
The cover shows an artist’s impression of the collision between the protoplanet Theia and proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. It has been suggested that it was this ‘Giant Impact’ that formed the Moon, but direct evidence for the existence of Theia remains elusive. In this week’s issue, Qian Yuan and his colleagues present combined results from simulations of the impact and mantle convection to explain why two large regions in Earth’s deepest mantle differ seismically and could be 2–3.5% denser than the surrounding mantle. The researchers suggest that the two dense areas are the remains of Theia’s iron-rich mantle that sank and accumulated above Earth’s core 4.5 billion years ago, surviving there throughout Earth’s history.
In one of the smallest, but still exciting, discoveries by Nasa in recent years, a spacecraft visiting a minor asteroid way out in the solar system has discovered that the chunk of space rock has its own tiny sidekick.
The spacecraft, called Lucy, was visiting asteroid Dinkinesh when it made the unexpected find of a moon companion.
The discovery was made during Wednesday’s flyby of Dinkinesh, 300m miles away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The spacecraft snapped a picture of the pair when it was about 270 miles out.
In data and images beamed back to Earth, the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. Its closely circling moon is a mere one-tenth of a mile (220 meters) in size.
Nasa sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for visiting the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter.
Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids now stands at 11.
Dinkinesh means “you are marvelous” in Ethiopia’s Amharic language….
The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will almost certainly NOT be when it visits us, nor when we visit it. It won’t be when we see its stray TV signals. It’ll be in the excruciatingly faint changes in the color of alien sunsets glimpsed hundreds of light years away. Today we’re going to talk about the first such hint, why it’s probably not aliens, and why there’s a tiny chance that it still might not not be aliens.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Nicholas Whyte, Steven French, Cliff, Carl Andor, Lise Andreasen, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]
